It ought to be common knowledge that Donald Trump is not fit for the presidency of the United States of America

In logic, there is a subtle but important distinction between the concept of mutual knowledge – information that everyone (or almost everyone) knows – and common knowledge, which is not only knowledge that (almost) everyone knows, but something that (almost) everyone knows that everyone else knows (and that everyone knows that everyone else knows that everyone else knows, and so forth). A classic example arises from Hans Christian Andersens’ fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes: the fact that the emperor in fact has no clothes is mutual knowledge, but not common knowledge, because everyone (save, eventually, for a small child) is refusing to acknowledge the emperor’s nakedness, thus perpetuating the charade that the emperor is actually wearing some incredibly expensive and special clothing that is only visible to a select few. My own personal favourite example of the distinction comes from the blue-eyed islander puzzle, discussed previously here, here and here on the blog. (By the way, I would ask that any commentary about that puzzle be directed to those blog posts, rather than to the current one.)

I believe that there is now a real-life instance of this situation in the US presidential election, regarding the following

Proposition 1. The presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, is not even remotely qualified to carry out the duties of the presidency of the United States of America.

Proposition 1 is a statement which I think is approaching the level of mutual knowledge amongst the US population (and probably a large proportion of people following US politics overseas): even many of Trump’s nominal supporters secretly suspect that this proposition is true, even if they are hesitant to say it out loud. And there have been many prominent people, from both major parties, that have made the case for Proposition 1: for instance Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, did so back in March, and just a few days ago Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee this year, did so in this speech:

However, even if Proposition 1 is approaching the status of “mutual knowledge”, it does not yet seem to be close to the status of “common knowledge”: one may secretly believe that Trump cannot be considered as a serious candidate for the US presidency, but must continue to entertain this possibility, because they feel that others around them, or in politics or the media, appear to be doing so. To reconcile these views can require taking on some implausible hypotheses that are not otherwise supported by any evidence, such as the hypothesis that Trump’s displays of policy ignorance, pettiness, and other clearly unpresidential behaviour are merely “for show”, and that behind this facade there is actually a competent and qualified presidential candidate; much like the emperor’s new clothes, this alleged competence is supposedly only visible to a select few. And so the charade continues.

I feel that it is time for the charade to end: Trump is unfit to be president, and everybody knows it. But more people need to say so, openly.

Important note: I anticipate there will be any number of “tu quoque” responses, asserting for instance that Hillary Clinton is also unfit to be the US president. I personally do not believe that to be the case (and certainly not to the extent that Trump exhibits), but in any event such an assertion has no logical bearing on the qualification of Trump for the presidency. As such, any comments that are purely of this “tu quoque” nature, and which do not directly address the validity or epistemological status of Proposition 1, will be deleted as off-topic. However, there is a legitimate case to be made that there is a fundamental weakness in the current mechanics of the US presidential election, particularly with the “first-past-the-post” voting system, in that (once the presidential primaries are concluded) a voter in the presidential election is effectively limited to choosing between just two viable choices, one from each of the two major parties, or else refusing to vote or making a largely symbolic protest vote. This weakness is particularly evident when at least one of these two major choices is demonstrably unfit for office, as per Proposition 1. I think there is a serious case for debating the possibility of major electoral reform in the US (I am particularly partial to the Instant Runoff Voting system, used for instance in my home country of Australia, which allows for meaningful votes to third parties), and I would consider such a debate to be on-topic for this post. But this is very much a longer term issue, as there is absolutely no chance that any such reform would be implemented by the time of the US elections in November (particularly given that any significant reform would almost certainly require, at minimum, a constitutional amendment).

476 comments

You’re almost certainly aware that we’re having our own election campaign at the moment in Australia, and we’re profoundly irritated that ours is going for 8 weeks. Like many others overseas, I have trouble understanding the Trump phenomenon, but then thinking about some of our own politicians it makes we realise maybe we haven’t done much better.

In the Australian/UK system, leaders are nominated by the party, which I believe tends to limit the power of autocrats to take over as self interest in the party room comes into play.

In Australia, we have had our own Trump in the form of Clive Palmer. That’s too long a story for a comment, but to the politically interested it’s well worth seeking out.

You’ve raised the preferential system (which has in my opinion been given a sensible reform in Australia where you no longer need to number the entire ballot paper) but let me also suggest the merits of compulsory voting. In truth, it’s not compulsory to vote, just to turn up on polling day. But the true merit is that it forces the state to supply the necessary infrastructure to enable every citizen to vote. While occasionally there are queues on polling day in Australia, it’s never to the same extent as has happened in the US or UK, where voting officials seem surprised if “turnout was greater than expected”

I believe that you have made it clear that you took Proposition 1 seriously and carefully. To allow for more meaningful discussion, can you show us your evidence and proofs for your proposition, or the reader can safely take the entire Hillary speech above to be all the evidence you would offer?

I believe there are multiple proofs of Proposition 1. Clinton’s argument, based primarily on foreign policy expertise and temperament, is my favourite, but the other two arguments I linked to, of Mitt Romney and of John Oliver, I think would also suffice; in addition to foreign policy and temperament, Romney also discusses Trump’s lack of economic expertise, and Oliver brings up Trump’s lack of regard for facts and their bearing on policy (e.g. on Trump’s famous “border wall” proposal). One could also demonstrate Proposition 1 by other means, for instance using his lack of prior experience in any sort of public office or service, or his demonstrated lack of regard for basic constitutional principles such as freedom of the press and an independent judiciary. This is probably not an exhaustive list of possible approaches to prove Proposition 1.

As you have mentioned, the US presidential election is largely limited to 2 choices, so the voting population’s task is to pick the better one, which cannot be accomplished wisely without adequate and reliable information on both sides. Information provided by those who are against Trump could have been spun or misquoted on purpose. On more vital occasions, for example the court, those would be categorized as interested parties. With all due respect, Donald Trump is the only obstacle at present between Hillary Clinton and the Presidency. Romney is an outstanding cheerleader for GOP Establishments, which was behind thousands of anti-Trump ads, and also tried to stop Trump as a third party or independent candidate after Trump became the presumptive nominee. John Oliver dislikes Trump with a passion the other night.

Hillary Clinton is an experienced lecturer. However, in the recent foreign policy speech, she made some mistakes about Trump. To be short, I will post 3 of them below with link.

1. Hillary: “This is someone who has threatened to abandon our allies in NATO.”
Trump wanted reconstruction of NATO. “I don’t mind NATO per se, but it has to be reconstituted, it has to be modernized,” “You know, we’re dealing with NATO from the days of the Soviet Union, which no longer exists. We need to either transition into terror or we need something else, because we have to get countries together.”http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/23/terror-trump-trade-and-nato/

2. Hillary: “He says he doesn’t have to listen to our generals or our admirals, our ambassadors and other high officials, because he has – quote – ‘a very good brain.’“
Trump put his own ideas to be primary while listening to others. ”I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things,” “I know what I’m doing, and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people, and at the appropriate time I’ll tell you who the people are,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday. “But I speak to a lot of people, but my primary consultant is myself, and I have a good instinct for this stuff.”http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/17/donald-trump-i-consult-myself-on-foreign-policy-be/

I think you may be taking Trump at his face value. To the three points you raised, I have these comments.

(1) Trump’s suggestion to “reconstruct” NATO: sure, but how has he exactly proposed to do that? Like with every other policy issues, he has failed to produce any concrete plan to exact his “propositions”–if they can even be called that. And that’s why he’s unfit as a leader; else, every other person with superficial ideas can call themselves “a leader with visions”.

(2) Trump listens to his advisers. Does he? On multiple occasions he has demonstrated himself to be interested in first and foremost his own voice. In addition, he has made it this far without being able to enlist any credible policy minds, which bodes badly to his prospects as a leader.

(3) Trump will exclude the new mayor of London from his Muslim ban. Here Clinton may have used rhetorics to amp up Trump’s previous statements but it doesn’t change the fact that Trump is, like with most other issues, inconsistent. He initially promised his voters to ban all Muslims. Then, after the people of London had elected their first Muslim mayor, he made an ex-post comment to retract part of his original statement. The fight he picked and the offense he made would not go away just like that.

Going back to Terry’s main topic of whether Mr Trump’s unfitness to be POTUS is common knowledge, the fact that both sides of the political spectrum still have arguments/counterarguments like these suggests that it may not even be mutual, let alone common knowledge. Both sides have been trying to make their respective perspective mutual to the other side but as each mainly refers to their preferred sources, I doubt it will happen.

You can surely disagree with my summarizations of Trump’s speeches, but it should be hard to summarize as the way Hillary put them. As “face value” lacks definition, I will not discuss that here, whereas I still have some comments for you.

1) Propositions are not solutions, which you may prefer, but still an essential step before any solutions are established. It is exactly the responsibility of a leader to detect a potential or existing problem and make propositions accordingly. Given that the NATO is consisted of countries with various interests and the detailed mechanism of NATO should be kept classified from the public, the reconstruction requires a series of complex secret negotiations, which may lead to completely different plans from the original ones. Even if Trump has any clues on these, he’d better keep them away from the crowd for confidentiality of the organization.

2) I believe it to be of the “tu quoque” nature. Moreover, “credible policy minds” are not defined.

3) To start with, rather than banning *all* muslims, which some media and others tend to use rhetorics to amp up, Trump proposed to ban muslim entering the U.S. Here is his press release which can be found on his own website.
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

Exceptions are not inconsistency, for the representatives will certainly figure out that Sadiq Khan is no threat to the country.

I’m looking forward to having a glance at your preferred sources of facts and reaching mutual understanding with you at some degree.

one of the issues with Trump is that he does so many interviews and is so inconsistent on the issues that pinning him down is difficult, especially given that he seems to be able to backtrack without suffering much damage politically. However, I think there’s a case to be made that Clinton is correct on 1 and 3 at least.

1. On NATO, Trump stated that he would push other countries to pay more to the US in order to be a part of NATO and that ‘if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO’. It’s also very unclear, I think, that a NATO aimed at targeting terrorism would still be NATO; after all, the ex-Soviet states are a part of NATO solely for defense against Russia. Hell, if the aim of NATO is anti-terrorism, why not invite Russia to join?

3. He did so, only after challenging him to an IQ test. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36299929 As someone in Britain, I can tell you that Trump’s remarks were widely seen as disrespectful (although Khan was already anti-Trump because of the Muslim ban before he became Mayor).

Terry – I have trouble relating to this. I have a feeling based on heuristics that Trump is unfit to be president. I wouldn’t say I’ve reached the level of “clear and convincing evidence,” in the legal terminology — and certainly nothing even close to a proof. Suppose we define “unfit to be president” (UTBP) as “if given the position of President, likely to cause substantial damage to the welfare of Americans and, secondarily, to other people in the world, relative to the conditions they would’ve been in had someone else been president.”

You’ve presented some information about him. But I don’t know what are the conditions that predict unfitness. What is the relationship between the traits that you’ve presented and unfitness? How predictive are they?

I am at a pre-rigorous stage in thinking about politics. It’s just so much more complicated than the things I know how to prove.

Do you feel you’re at a post-rigorous stage in thinking about politics? What definition of UTBP do you have in mind? Could you demonstrate your claims? Or are you using heuristics that might be totally wrong, like I am – and using the word “proof” in an informal way, to mean something more like “suggestion”.

I would guess that Tao does not think he (or anyone else) has reached a rigorous (much less post-rigorous) understanding of politics. A “rigorous” understanding of politics would allow intelligent people to finally reach a consensus about political decisions. Mankind is nowhere near that point, as evidenced by this comment thread, and probably a “rigorous” understanding of politics is impossible.

I guess that Tao’s use of the words “proposition” and “proof” in this discussion is slightly joking. It goes without saying that these words are not being used in the way they are used in math, of course.

In online forums people tend to make the error of interpreting remarks in the least generous possible way.

I’ll just throw my opinion in here : Trump’s suggestion to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the US was appalling to me and I would never vote for him after that (as well as many other things he has said).

“A “rigorous” understanding of politics would allow intelligent people to finally reach a consensus about political decisions.”

No such bullshit as “intelligent” people in politics,
as that would imply “stupid” people in politics.
There is no such thing. Politics is all about what people
(the lawmakers) think SHOULD be. It is not a test of knowledge
about what is.

Politics & law are just dumb brainless brute force war.
So, yes, I proudly DO advocate & encourage gunning down
unpatriotic stupid hypocrites who eat meat & breed,
torturing & murdering hundreds of others in the process,
while forcing laws (justified or not) onto others.
Preaching the “law of the jungle” except when one is
in a disadvantage, then crying to the big govt, police,
to save them.

Trump is an extremely successful businessman. The fact that being a successful businessman is a meaningful qualification for the presidency is something that ought to be common knowledge. Building a successful business takes a world of skills that merely holding public office does not. In fact, the primary hurdle to public office is often winning an election, which is not necessarily a meaningful qualification, as this very article accurately suggests. The claims about Trump’s views on freedom of the press or on independent judiciary being at odds with constitutional principles are unsubstantiated. Advocating a “border wall” (sic scare quotes) is not unreasonable. Here is a paper substantiating that: https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/iiclr/pdf/vol15p349.pdf

Thanks for your post! You’re in good company, and I wish more people would speak out.

Regarding chances for reform at the US Presidential election level, there’s a very interesting and clever plan called the National Popular Vote plan, which was invented by a Stanford computer science professor. While it doesn’t address the spoiler effect, it doesn’t require a constitutional amendment. Eleven states have enacted it so far: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

Regarding Proposition 1, the media has a vested interest in preventing it from becoming common knowledge. This is because a closer race leads to greater readership / viewership.

PS – I live and vote in San Francisco, which also uses IRV (we’ve been using it since 2004), and I’m also a big fan of IRV for single-winner elections.

Jurn Leung, my across the street neighbor, forwarded this essay. I want to share with you a story I’ve told some of my friends or when relevant, my psychotherapy patients over the years about real ending of “The Emperor Has No Clothes.” In my version – i.e. what usually happens in real life (think of with many whistle blowers) is that the child (or anyone who sees things clearly about a person in power) shouts out that the emperor has no clothes. Instead of the crowd finally seeing the emperors nakedness and taking up the chant, the emperor has the child arrested and – I should say – sent to Guantanamo to be water boarded.

STV is a bit more than instant-runoff, particularly in its ability to do proportional representation without political parties (when I first started voting the parties didn’t appear on the Australian Senate voting paper). I would also like to see some acknowledgement by elite figures (such as yourself and John Baez and David Brin) that Trump is a symptom of the fact that the middle class is doing it tough over the last 20 years, with technology producing wealth without jobs. This is creating tribalism that can work out badly in more ways than electing inappropriate candidates. The success of the advanced economies is based on technology creating as well as destroying jobs. During periods when this worked badly (1890s, 1930s) America was tenacious in sticking with minimal government intervention and that was eventually the right solution. Whether it can work in the age of AI is not so clear.

What are the duties of the president of the U.S.? First you have to define what a government is. It is the executive council of the ruling class, i.e. in the case of the U.S., the capitalist class. Then the president is nothing more or less than the chairman of the board of the executive committee of the ruling class. In other words, the president works only in the interest of the ruling and by definition against the interests of the working class, as their interests are, for all practical purposes, diametrically opposed. Only when the working class confronts and makes demands regarding the injustices and exploitation by the ruling does, does the president bring in reforms – never before.

Trump is leading fascist mobs and they must be confronted and defeated. The ruling class calls on these fascist gangs to attack the working class and their organizations. The U.S. had fascism for 100 years and it is called Jim Crow.

A better position than yours would be to determine which interests among the ruling class each party and candidate represents. But rest assured, both Trump and Clinton represent the interests of the ruling class.

Thank you for writing this. I completely agree with both the proposition itself, and the fact that it’s important for people to come out and say it.

I think there are a few reasons why people don’t take the danger of Trump as seriously as they should.

1. Some people might believe that the identity of the president might not matter as much, and the office shapes the person much more than the other way around. I believe the last 16 years should offer a very strong counterexample to that. Whatever your views are of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, it’s hard to argue that each of them did not make a very significant difference (in largely opposing directions).

2. We tend to try to force facts into our preconceived paradigms. One needs to go back many many years to find a candidate for president as uniquely unqualified as Trump, and so, once he was nominated, it’s sometimes easier for us to assume that he’s no worse than usual, than to accept that something truly outrageous happened.

3. The nature of political debate often tends to emphasize smaller differences and not distinguish so much between someone that is opposed to you in several issues and someone who’s completely beyond the pale. So you could have democrats arguing that all republicans are equally unfit for office or even some more liberal democrats arguing that Hillary is indistinguishable from Trump. That view can be understandable if you feel that anything short of The One True Policy is equally terrible, but one should remember that the president of the United States is going to have a lot of real impact on real people, and different imperfect policies can make a huge difference for them.

Regarding point 1, really? With a few exceptions (eg healthcare), seems to me that Obama was simply Bush 3.0. Certainly that’s true regarding foreign policy, which, of all the functions of the US government, has had the largest impact on the world. What do you think Bush would have done differently if he were president 09-present, or what would Obama have done differently if he were president 01-09?

My comment is not related to politics. If people were allowed to cast their vote confidentially whether the emperor is naked or not then the truth would come out. Would not it? So why worry here? If everybody or almost everybody believes Trump is unfit then is not that will be voted? Does one’s vote depend upon personal knowledge or common knowledge?

Hi Kamal. Many people don’t like to be wrong. Hence their votes are strongly influenced by their beliefs about the beliefs of other people. Also, many people like to act against what smart people say should be common knowledge.

Thanks for posting the symptoms of NPD. That certainly describes Trump.

Some articles suggest that Trump might have dementia. That would explain his strange speech patterns, and more.

HalBrown SoCalSal May 29 · 10:07:08 AM
I’ve wondered about dementia too. I have seen indications of early signs which I won’t go into here beyond saying it is mostly when he seems befuddled when trying to respond to a question he doesn’t have a ready canned answer for, and his sometimes disjointed language. Of course one can have a personality disorder and develop dementia too. If it’s true, unless it is the rapidly developing kind, the symptoms won’t be severe enough to get people currently supporting him to change their minds.

SoCalSal HalBrown May 29 · 12:28:21 PM
As you say, the public might not notice if Trump is developing dementia. I wonder if his family and close associates wouldn’t notice, and what they’d do about it if they do notice a decline.

It was just yesterday that I was thinking to myself that Trump is exhibiting signs of dementia in his speech. I have not until now heard anyone else talk about this idea, but I do have personal experience with someone with dementia. It’s not just the “disjointed language” that I see; it’s also the apparent loss of executive function relative to social verbal inhibition, and his persistent use of a limited number of pejorative adjectives, sometimes naked without their associated nouns.

To be fair, Bernie Sanders, who is now 74, could already be in early dementia without yet showing obvious signs.

Look at some Trump interviews from the 80’s and 90’s, he has always talked like that. He used to be much more soft spoken, but apart from that his speech patterns are pretty much the same. I think The Apprentice is what made him louder and less inhibited. Here

The transition from mutual knowledge to common knowledge is some kind of breaking an equilibrium and moving to another. So you need to give current equilibrium a disturbance, e.g. the child in Emperor’s New Clothes, or the foreigner in red-blue-eyed islander puzzle, to let it move.

But Trump was bashed by celebrities and media from beginning (remember those headlines from Huffington Post, Fox, CNN, Washington Post, etc? you name it), so IMHO, it’s not feasible to say there’s not enough disturbance. And quite contrary, no other candidate has even taken as much negative views but Trump still dominated GOP. I cannot think of what more disturbance is like, maybe the riots brought by anti-Trump parties are not enough?

Anyway, this proposition is hard to prove or disprove since the term presidency is far from a boolean judgement.

As presidential election, I partially agree with you that something must be changed. But the root issue is that states have more power than in Australia, and that’s why this country is called U.S. So Any candidate dominates a state will take all votes from it, and unfortunately this is granted as state’s privilege. If this is not changed, the 3rd runner still have no chance to win.

It’s often worse than symbolic (worse than useless): in many cases, a vote for a third-party candidate is equivalent to handing a vote to one’s worse (worst) major-party choice, which many people unhappy with the two-party system rightly find repugnant.

“But this is very much a longer term issue, as there is absolutely no chance that any such reform would be implemented by the time of the US elections in November (particularly given that any significant reform would almost certainly require, at minimum, a constitutional amendment).”

That’s true of any significant reform which required legislative change, legislatures being controlled by the two major parties, who have a shared interest in maintaining their duopoly. But it’s not necessarily true of the reform which citizens can enact on their own, without legislative mediation, and protected by the Constitution in its current form. This can take the form of pairing up R and D dissenters to defeat the spoiler effect. (We make the argument here, and are very interested in rebuttals or other responses: http://pairvote.org/)

I woke up one night and had a bout of insomnia as I imagined with horror what a Trump presidency could do to our nation. I realized I had to do everything I could to stop it – not because I’m so influential, but because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise. So I’ve begun a series of articles telling people why Trump is unfit for office:

What specifically do you fear? I don’t think Trump will be a particularly good president but I’m puzzled by all this “sky is falling” stuff from otherwise intelligent people. In some ways Trump is clearly better tha Clinton – look at his foreign policy speech. He is one of the few political contenders in recent years to admit that the US is somewhat responsible for the chaos in the middle east, and he advocates a less interventionist foreign policy. Compare this to Clinton’s track record.

Looking at what is happening in the Middle East, Hillary Clinton is barely in the position to talk about expertise in foreign policy, because she supported it all. Unless, of course, we think that it is a success. Do we? Neither she is in the position to point at someone’s temperament. So, this proof needs reconsideration.

Trump’s lack of any experience in public office is not necessarily a shortcoming. This proof needs more elaboration on why not being a professional politician is a bad thing for a candidate.

Whether Trump fits to be a president or not – is irrelevant. More important thing is: why he is being supported by so many? Why is Sanders being also supported? People tired of current policy, economy, etc. Hillary is not going to change the status quo.

Dear Terri, The proof of Proposition 1 is false. You refer to statements by Hillary (who is a political opponent, and who said similar things about Obama in 2008) and Oliver, who is very smart but just a left-leaning comedian after all. By the way I remember that Bush-41 said quite the same things about Bill Clinton in 1992. Using similar math-like arguments one can prove anything. For example, Teichmuller “proved” that Jews are totally unfit to teach mathematics to true Germans. In fact he honestly believed in his “proof”, and tried to convince Landau because he thought that Landau as a good mathematician should agree with Teichmuller’s logic. Best, — Mark

I am afraid that T. Tao makes a logical mistake applying “The Emperor’s New Clothes” fable in the way he does. I think, that a situation is rather opposite:

In this fable people were publicly admiring the Emperor’s new clothes while privately knowing that the Emperor was naked. However now we see mainly public claims that Trump does not fit to be a president while electors privately vote for him.

It’s the Professional Protesters’ New Clothes!
“So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.” –Scott Adamshttp://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement-for-president-of-the-united-states

I have an issue with Proposition 1, and it’s not that it’s false, it’s that it’s an answer to the wrong question. Many Americans (and many others around the world) are not voting for someone qualified because they don’t care about qualifications ; they are voting for someone they perceive to be “outside the system” or “different” to “shake things up” in government. This is why Trump is dangerous, and will not be defeated using pure logic in the conventional set of political logic and assumptions.

Terry, unless I’m mistaken, which I hope I am, it appears you’ve transformed from intellectual to poo-slinging monkey. It would be very sad if someone in your position and with your natural gifts had degraded himself to such chimp-like behavior, so I hope it isn’t true.

For example, “qualified” is fundamentally a relative term. If every single major party candidate in the last 20 years were less qualified than Trump, then a normal person wouldn’t say Trump is unqualified; instead quite the opposite. Yet you say that comparing Trump to, say, Hillary Clinton is not a valid line of reasoning and un-related to the “epistemological” (terrible jargon, by the way) nature of the proposition. Huh? But the proposition itself is a relative proposition.

Further, in order to judge whether someone is qualified for the presidency, you must understand several deep issues. One of them being: the nature of the presidency.

Do you? If not, are you simply relying on experts (New York Times, academics, etc.) who tell you what the president should do? And if you are, are you correcting for the bias of the experts? Experts who aren’t leftist (compared to, say, the general population) tend not to get published or get tenure– it’s no conspiracy theory. And many soft forces (like groupthink, incentives, signaling, …) pushes “experts” in a certain direction, as well. So you better be doing a great deal of bias correction here.

And generally to correct for massive bias, you ideally want to have some actual familiarity with the matter at hand…

What do you make of the many very intelligent people outside of your social group who support and admire Trump? Consider that Peter Thiel, a very intelligent person, is a Trump delegate. Sure, I don’t know whether he personally thinks Trump is qualified, but that should give you some pause.

Other things you may want to understand is, “How does democracy work?” “How does politics work?” “What is the aim of politics?” “How are the lives of different types of people and how are they affected by politics?”

The answers to those questions are all connected and let you honestly evaluate how qualified a candidate is. And you can’t just take some expert’s word for it! (Bias, and even outright lying, is rampant at all levels of intellectual/political society.)

For instance, let’s say the aim of US politics should be to serve the interests of the American people (I’m not so bold as to make that claim!). Has it done that? If you read some Mencius Moldbug, you’ll see the answer is, no. If you haven’t read Mencius Moldbug–the smartest right-wing intellectual alive–you probably haven’t really read any right-wing intellectuals, and are probably forming your opinions almost entirely on what you’ve heard from left-wing intellectuals.

Which really makes your announcement about “Trump is bad!” uninformed and worse than useless. Terry, you have a good job. You’re smart. You seem to have a happy life. What do you personally gain by making deceptive and uninformed statements? Surely your personal goal shouldn’t be to spout off about things you know nothing about? It doesn’t help you or anyone else.

By the way, your recommendation that someone watch a 35 minute Clinton speech is, I hate to say it, disgustingly stupid. In the time spent watching a bland 35 minute speech written by a speechwriter/propagandist for the TV-watching sub-100 IQ masses, one could read a chapter of a good book, or a post on a good blog, and have gained, rather than lost, knowledge. (Perhaps skimming a transcript of the Clinton speech can be justified for certain people, but only if your mind has sufficient context for interpreting what you read accurately.)

Spending 35 minutes of your time consuming mindless propaganda should make a sane person throw up his food. The number of manipulation/influence techniques there will bend your mind, and not in a good way.

1. He’s a billionaire. He had a reputation as a businessman for getting a lot of things done. His properties are run very smoothly. Conclusion: He’s good at getting things done.

2. He has many children and grandchildren. So he doesn’t want the world to go to hell. Conclusion: He has skin in the game.

3. His wife loves him. He sells many books. He’s very skilled at persuading people (e.g. in rallies). He’s a skilled talker in interviewers. Conclusion: He’s sharp and good with people.

4. His family members endorse him, including ex-wife. Contestants on the Apprentice who’ve worked for him like him. Golfers like Natalie Gulbis like him. Conclusion: He’s honest and has worked to keep a good reputation all his life.

This comment is a joke, right? You’re a liberal trying to make right-wingers look intellectually vacuous by making the most patently ridiculous and self-refuting arguments possible, right? You can’t possibly write nonsense like this and think it’s convincing on a blog frequented by logically rigorous commentators.

And on top of that, you think a word like “epistemological” is “terrible jargon” on an academic’s blog.

By the way, I have wasted my time reading “Mencius Moldbug” as well as the far superior writers he tries to imitate, like Thomas Carlyle, and I can conclusively tell you that if Moldbug is the best “intellectual” the right-wing has to offer, then the right-wing is indeed a sick joke on society.

(1) You claim “logically rigorous commentators,” and here we have Mr Tao citing John Oliver, an intellectual midget, as “proof” of Proposition 1. This is anything but logically rigorous. You are being deceptive, Edwin.

(2) “Epistemological” is a big, meaningless word typically used as cover for bad ideas. That you don’t admit this is sad, Edwin.

(3) “Patently ridiculous and self-refuting arguments.” This is nonsense, Edwin.

For instance, let me elaborate on my first argument above, about Trump being a billionaire.

Competing at Trump’s level in the private sector requires skill that few people possess. Politicians don’t have those skills. Academics don’t have those skills. Internet commenters certainly don’t have those skills. Self-made billionaires don’t become billionaires out of dumb luck. They need strong business sense. This Trump has and makes him more qualified for the presidency.

(4) Not everyone likes or can understand Moldbug. Reading him is not for everyone. But claiming his well-read arguments are a “sick joke” is absurd and smacks of dishonesty, Edwin. Moldbug is a very intelligent man.

(5) Edwin, you have an annoying, intellectually dishonest habit of smashing together multiple lies in a single sentence in order to try to win an argument. Based on the repeated instances of deceptive sophistry in your comment, Edwin, I look at you with a mixture of pity and contempt.

> 1. He’s a billionaire. He had a reputation as a businessman for getting a lot of things done. His properties are run very smoothly. Conclusion: He’s good at getting things done.

This is demonstrably false, as many of his businesses have failed — including the likes of Trump stakes that he tried to market during his campaign.

> 2. He has many children and grandchildren. So he doesn’t want the world to go to hell.

Apparently not enough to consider global warming a serious threat, instead of a Chinese conspiracy.

> 3. His wife loves him.

Unrelated.

> He sells many books.

Not as much as he claims. He lied about his book sales.

> 4. His family members endorse him, including ex-wife. Contestants on the Apprentice who’ve worked for him like him. Golfers like Natalie Gulbis like him. Conclusion: He’s honest and has worked to keep a good reputation all his life.

Unrelated, and the argument does not support the conclusion. Just because some people like him, does not mean that he is honest. In fact, he has been caught lying so many times it’s pretty much impossible to fact check him.

> 5. His policies are, in my opinion, the policies most aligned with the self interests of math professors.

“Trump had some failures so he was a bad businessman” is the Romney argument, but it’s a bad one. Entrepreneurship is about failure. If you don’t fail you don’t learn. A successful businessman has many failures. Here’s how Trump thinks about business: he expects to make many bad deals, but he limits potential losses and expects to win in the long-run.

>Apparently not enough to consider global warming a serious threat, instead of a Chinese conspiracy.

I never said Trump wasn’t clownish. Trump has made clownish statements such as that one in the past. I’d excuse this statement as joking banter; a reaction to global warming alarmism. After all, there’s evidence global warming scientists exaggerate claims to get funding, etc. He hasn’t repeated this clownish statement since he started running.

> Unrelated.

If your wife loves you, your personal life is in order. It’s a good sign as to your emotional strength and stability. Attractive women don’t like unstable men.

> Just because some people like him, does not mean that he is honest.

He’s made business deals with thousands of people. If Trump had been dishonest in his business, these people would be coming out against him in droves. (Remember the press hates him!) Instead, these people if anything tend to praise him!

> Like that time that he claimed that unemployment is 20%?

Official unemployment rate (5%?) doesn’t include people who’ve given up looking for work. The official employment rate for working age people is around 60% and at historic lows. Trump’s defining unemployment differently from the government and making a point that jobs are becoming harder to find for many Americans. This rings true for voters.

I think that you are absolutely right about Trump not being remotely qualified to be president. The problem is that this idea easily spills over to the idea that his supporters are not even remotely qualified to vote. This I profoundly disagree with.

What we have in this Trump thing is similar to what we had here in the UK with Farage and UKIP. Supporters were routinely portrayed as knuckle dragging morons who had been duped into believing poisonous ideas about immigrants etc.

The idea that there could be any rational content to their rejection of the liberal agenda was not even considered. The liberals just got more and more illiberal as if talking about another race of human beings. ‘You can’t say that” and so forth. Then a bit of liberal baiting from the other side and so on back and forth like a sick Punch and Judy show.

What this reveals is really a crisis of democracy that leads liberal and very intelligent people to reveal the fact that they have lost all sense of social solidarity with large sections of their own people. No one actually says it but the liberals themselves have no clothes either. They have become illiberal and if they were honest would say what they actually think about Trump supporters “They are not fit to vote, they are too thick, too easily led, they are not educated like us, perhaps only educated liberal people with the ‘right’ ideas ought to have the vote.” This is why it is a crisis of democracy that goes deeper than Trump getting elected.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that you are such an illiberal but the thought seems to hover in the air around the debate like an electrical charge waiting for something to ground it. An unspoken mutual knowledge of the educated classes.

I would suggest that the reason that the Trump supporters are voting for him doe as have a rational content. In the fable of the King with no clothes, the rational content was the peoples’ fear of arbitrary power. The answer is not to ridicule the people but to act in solidarity with them to remove that arbitrary power. The answer to Trump is to offer them another way of being free that has a rational form because that is why they are voting Trump, because they want to be more free. Free of what? That’s for you guys over there to find out by reaching out and talking to them. Always look for the rational core to ideology because there has to be some truth in order for the lie to be believed. The rational core is ‘freedom’. And it’s about time the left reclaimed this word from the right.

While I do agree with the core message here, the argument provided is a tad ridiculous. The proof of Proposition 1 is, both in the comments and the post, provided by political opponents. One could do this with *any* presidential candidate in recent years. The post seems to convey a message of an ironclad proof of Trump’s incompetence; this line of rhetoric can quickly become dangerous.

Politics is not mathematics. You are expressing an inherently subjective opinion (and I do happen to agree with it.) The way you present that opinion, however, is done in a somewhat forceful manner. Trump satisfies the formal qualifications to become the US president. With the current definitions, if he is to win the US election, Proposition 1 is false. Perhaps a better direction to go is to change the definitions as to make the proposition true.

While better voting system would be great improvement, I don’t think It’s the main reason for Trump.

Italy had Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi became PM in multi party proportional political system. He even had his own party. US Establishment has previously picked people like Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin and changed the view of what is considered qualified.

I see Trump as evolution. There are only two things that make Trump more advanced version of his predecessors:

1. lack of handlers. GWB had his neocons. Trump has selected his own. Some of them have credentials but there are many unknowns.

Though I agree entirely with the sentiment behind the Proposition, I’m afraid I’m going to have to agree with those above who disagree with you on it’s truth. It’s a wonderful metaphor, but it isn’t a logical proposition. Trump as President will likely destroy the entire US constitutional system by his complete disregard for it’s underlying construction. Rule of law survives because it is respected by those with power and he will not respect it. Those voting for him to “shake things up” will discover that shaking things up too much can and will make things worse. I think the fact that he will likely destroy the constiutional system which will elect him is the best argument that he is unqualified. But I don’t think other people are required to accept an axiom system in which this is a true statement, so I don’t think the Proposition, as such, is proven. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/us/politics/donald-trump-constitution-power.html?_r=0

I think one can make some additional interesting arguments about how both Bush II and Obama have already degraded the rule of law, by say spying on US citizens illegally and having them executed by drone strike. So one could argue that even this aspect of Trump is a difference of degree and not a difference of kind. Of course differences of degree can lead to phase transitions and I suspect Trump, if elected, leads to a phase transition. I sincerely hope he is not elected.

Liberals, through their blatant disregard of the commonsense meaning of the Constitution, have done a very fine job eviscerating the Constitution of any objective meaning. They have self-serving short circuited the legislature and managed to magically find all sorts of rights–abortion, homogamy, etc–hidden in its text. Interpretations which would obviously be reprehensible to any of the Founders. Shame.

Terry, I find you’re pseudoproof to be specious; and, inter alia, doesn’t begin to address the entirety of the relevant issues that a voter has to balance.

Trump has so many enemies on the establishment right and left, I see a far greater likelihood that he will be held accountable. The inertia of a vast, unseen and unelected bureaucracy will be against him to. Can’t say the same for Hillary.

Did you notice that Trump’s rhetoric is a case of your proposal to move from “mutual” to “common” knowledge?:
Trump’s bet on the stupidity of the people includes a bet on the intellectual inability of the scientists – without doubt his advisers and all of the republican think tanks took the climate change public discourse as proof of the later. There too, it was very clear that only a strong repeated public communication by scientists would be needed, but they failed completely. (Misleading PR by climate damaging industry took in turn the previous cigarette smoking discourse as model, which showed a similar unability of the (medical) science community). Other sources of that special “mutual knowledge” among Trump’s supporters comes from business experience, how one can treat academic employees, academic customers (e.g. it is well known in financial industry that academic degrees increase the gullibility in silly investments), how easy academic education gets turned into silly business schemes.
Trump’s rhetoric turns that from “mutual” to “common” knowledge.

You’re of course free to delete this comment and change your blog policy at whim. (Is this still a math research blog? I came here looking for “[u]pdates on [your] research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other maths-related topics”, and certainly not expecting to be bombarded with political propaganda.)

But to the substance of your post: I actually agree with your Proposition 1. In turn, I present for your consideration Proposition 2: Hillary Clinton is unfit to be President of the United States. As proof, I offer the Benghazi fiasco and the illegal storage of classified emails on a private server (most likely to avoid FOIA requests), which has already caused the country significant damage:http://observer.com/2016/02/breaking-hillary-clinton-put-spies-lives-at-risk/

This is not exactly a tu-quoque retort. Rather, this is a question to you and your readers: What is a nation to do when both of its two major-party presidential nominees are unfit for the high office? (Aside from mourning the sad state of affairs, that is.)

One answer would be to bring out the pitchforks. Barring that, when both candidates are unfit for office, fitness ceases to be a relevant criterion. So personality, likability, and the very visceral consideration of “which one is more likely to look out for me” come to the forefront.

Trump voters are not (all) idiots; you can be assured that this one is not. Logically accepting Prop. 1 does not entail pulling the lever for Hillary.

There’s a third type of knowledge, maybe we can call it propagandized knowledge. Basically the idea is, if you keep saying something enough times, eventually people will believe it as the truth.

Look, I’m anything but a Trump supporter. But the notion that Trump’s incompetency is “mutual knowledge” is obsurd. There are millions of people voting for him–people who believe our biggest issues are the influx of illegals, the threats of ISIS, and a society that has gone crazy with political correctness.

Whether they’re right or wrong is certainly open for debate, but I certainly wouldn’t suggest there’s a general consensus regarding Trump and being unfit for the office.

And before you write that off as the dumb masses following an idiot, there are plenty of politicians and political figures who have supported Trump for quite some time. Former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich certainly Coles to mind, as does Chris Christie, Pat Buchanan, etc.

I am not sure that the axiomatic setting of common knowledge is appropriate for many economic situations including the current US elections.

To talk about common knowledge you have to make numerous assumptions that are hard to justify in this context – including 1) players are rational 2) there is a common partition of the space which everybody knows and includes each and every person opinion 3) people can compute logical deductions on the partition based on other people statement etc. etc.

I think it is fair to say that Bayesian Econ is not considered a predictive model for rational players such as financial institutions so applying it in the context of voting is more than a bit of stretch.

This is not to say that I do not think that Donald Trump is a good candidate obviously.

Just for fun let me give you the common knowledge argument from the other direction:

1. Everybody knows that establishment politicians are corrupt and do not answer to their voters (I actually think that some version of this statement is well accepted and also correct. For a liberal perspective on this you can read for example the recent book, “nation on the take”).

2. HRC is an establishment politician.

3. DT is not an establishment politician.

The logical conclusion from this argument is that it is common knowledge that HRC is corrupt while it is not clear if DT is.

Again – this is not my personal opinion. However, I want to make the case that since the mathematical model of common knowledge is not a good model for decision making in the context of the current elections, one can possibly arguments going in the other direction as well.

“1) players are rational 2) there is a common partition of the space which everybody knows and includes each and every person opinion 3) people can compute logical deductions on the partition based on other people statement etc. etc.”

This is not really true: common knowledge is defined independent of assumptions about rationality, though to make connections between actions and knowledge or belief hierarchies, you do need axioms about rationality or similar things.

Relatedly, “the same partition” is, when the model is appropriately defined, a tautology rather than a substantive assumption….

So I think your critique misrepresents the needed assumptions a little bit. Though I understand that for some of the stronger conclusions of analyses that use common knowledge, you do need strong and implausible assumptions.

I think that only a very view would not concede that there is something not quite right with democracy in America, not least the electoral system. I suppose you could argue that Donald Trump is proof of that and Hilary Clinton hardly the best counter-example.

I basically agree with you. I’m not an American, and therefore can’t vote, and even if I could vote, I would not vote for Trump. However, “the duties of the presidency” isn’t particularly well-defined. Among intelligent political operatives and commentators who are pro-Trump, their support is probably based on the idea that a lot of activities normally done by Presidents would be delegated. For example, there’s quite a consensus that Reagan didn’t have much competence or ability. But this simply meant that many normally presidential tasks (such as making substantive comments to the media) were delegated to subordinates. Of course, the Reagan programme was ultra-conservative, so, from a liberal point of view, I don’t like what his administration did. But I don’t see that Reagan’s incompetence caused problems — it just meant that there was more delegation.

From: Whats new To: pauldepstein@yahoo.com Sent: Sunday, June 5, 2016 2:02 AM Subject: [New post] It ought to be common knowledge that Donald Trump is not fit for the presidency of the United States of America #yiv2214098539 a:hover {color:red;}#yiv2214098539 a {text-decoration:none;color:#0088cc;}#yiv2214098539 a.yiv2214098539primaryactionlink:link, #yiv2214098539 a.yiv2214098539primaryactionlink:visited {background-color:#2585B2;color:#fff;}#yiv2214098539 a.yiv2214098539primaryactionlink:hover, #yiv2214098539 a.yiv2214098539primaryactionlink:active {background-color:#11729E;color:#fff;}#yiv2214098539 WordPress.com | Terence Tao posted: “In logic, there is a subtle but important distinction between the concept of mutual knowledge – information that everyone (or almost everyone) knows – and common knowledge, which is not only knowledge that (almost) everyone knows, but something that (almo” | |

Terry, I think there may be an error in the epistemology of this post. I am not certain that if people are unwilling to say that Trump is unfit to be president, it really means that they don’t know that others know he is unfit. I, myself, am a great believer in telling the truth. There are situations where it would be politically advantageous to lie and I cannot make myself do it. Nevertheless, sometimes it is politically advantageous to lie even when you know that everyone knows you are doing it.

Let me give an example from math department politics. This will be a true example. Luckily, I have belonged to enough math departments that any of my colleagues or former colleagues can credibly believe I am not referring to them. Once I sat on a hiring committee which was very fractured. Each member of the committee has his or her own candidate that year. One of those candidates was not really qualified for the job. Everyone knew this except possibly the person who proposed the candidate. Each of us knew that the others knew. In fact, we even discussed these facts among ourselves in private. However, when we discussed the unqualified candidate in committee. It was nothing but flattery. (A departmental bigwig not on the committee had already criticized the candidate in a way which offended the person who had proposed him.) The members of the committee felt compelled to say what a good candidate it was in order to have the opposite effect. I could not say that, and as I sat silently in that meeting, I felt it having a detrimental effect on the prospects of my own candidate. Incidentally, it was a very near-run thing that we did not hire the unqualified candidate. All that would have had to happen so that we would have is that all the other candidates reject us. We would not have been able to get out of it without offending the person who had proposed the candidate.

I think a very similar thing is going on here. DT has real supporters. In addition to that, those real supporters have friends. When you argue, in my view correctly, that DT is unqualified, you offend those supporters and even their friends. This can have the effect of riling them up and making them more enthusiastic. I think this is what DT is counting on and is a risk which Clinton takes by taking this tack.

This may even have been the case with the naked emperor. The reason the child could what it did, was because it was functionally autistic and therefore ignorant of the social conventions in which it was acting. Because everyone recognized the child’s ignorance, nobody could be offended by it, which is why it was safe for the child.

If we are going to be logical about this, it seems that one would need to define the meaning of “qualified.” Per the U.S. Constitution, the qualifications to be president are defined in Article II, Section I, Clause 5 — which states: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.” It appears that Trump in fact meets these qualifications. However, it is important to note that there are legal questions concerning citizenship with regards to the meaning of the phrase “natural born.” Such issues could very well apply to Trump for all we know, but not as the clause has been interpreted in current case law.

Of course, any would-be president would also have to be elected. In this sense, it’s up to the American people to judge any other qualifying criteria in the voting booth. This said, Trump can in fact take office if he is elected. When people ask me who should be president, I usually respond: “The candidate elected by the people, of course.” It seems to me that this is the most important qualification of all. That doesn’t mean that I necessarily want that candidate to be president — but what I want and what should be are different things altogether. I could view the potentially disastrous outcomes as an inherent flaw of democracy. However, I tend to believe the dharma or causality of the natural system serves as the judge of people’s choices rather than democracy itself.

Looking at the positive side, Donald Trump may be a wake-up call that there is something wrong with the system. People have been making suggestions and recommendations for constitutional change since its ratification. The topic became of particular interest following the American Civil War, generally focusing on the problem of a difficult amendment process, and proposing additional legal qualifications would require amending the U.S. Constitution. There are other structural changes that would be easier, such as changing the electoral system and addressing political polarization due to party politics. Even so, I think that the most important change that needs to take place is a cultural one among the electorate. Changing the electoral process could aid in transforming the culture. There are many different types of electoral systems with their advantages and disadvantages, but no amount of legal and procedural change will help if something doesn’t change in the minds of the American people.

The ultimate question is whether that change can take place without the appropriate organizational changes, or whether those organizational or structural changes can happen without some cultural change in the electorate’s mentality. I guess I’m of the opinion that if you change what happens within the system, the needed changes to the system will happen — but that’s simply my idealism as an educator talking. The reality could be that we are faced with an impossible triangle sealing our fate.

I do not think Proposition 1 is close to being mutual knowledge in the population of the US. After living for 12 years in a small town in Texas, I know many people including university colleagues and neighbors that would disagree with Proposition 1. In my opinion there are 3 types of Trump supporters: (1) the people in the anyone but Hillary camp. One could make a case that this group also knows Proposition 1 is true. (2) Republicans that do not know what are the duties of a president. I think that this is the group Paul Ryan was addressing in his pseudo-endorsement of Trump where he essentially said the GOP would create the agenda and Trump would only help pushing it through. In my opinion this group may not know Proposition 1 is true. (3) People that do not base their decisions based on facts but on gut feeling. Bill Maher loves to talk about this group, usually when he talks about climate change. In my opinion this group also may not know that Proposition 1 is true simply because they do not care to ponder about it. Their vote does not depend on arguments or facts showing Trump may or may not be fit to be president. It depends entirely on their gut feeling. In the opinion of this Texan resident, this camp is not as small as one would tend to think.

Have you ever considered that there are people who support Donald Trump for reasons other than the ones you have summed up?

To me, Trump is a means to an end – a way to finally halt the Overton window’s decades-long gradual shift towards the progressive left. I believe that social and cultural identity are central to human existence and the human experience, and that governments as we have in the West today – which assume equality and compatibility between cultures, a laughable impossibility – are so out of touch with the real world that they must inevitably fail. This breakdown of fact-based government could physically destroy our civilization.

As a result, a Trump presidency would be a milestone, a sign that finally the pendulum might start swinging ever so slowly back to a more moderate position instead of the far-left position that it finds itself in today.

I don’t know if you have stated it, but I would ask if one of your axioms is that the most unfit president is necessarily the least desirable scenario. Not necessarily in my view.

If a person wants to completely change the system, it would be unwise to play by the current rules of the system. It is my assumption that American politics is irredeemably corrupt, and we therefore should elect someone who is the most openly corrupt so we can be honest about it. Any attempt to change the system for the better using the system’s means itself will backfire. Sanders and Clinton make many promises, but don’t give any mathematical model as to the odds of those promises being fulfilled. Trump makes some false promises too, but these are the promises that you don’t want.

Every government in the world is corrupt. This is because there is an imbalance of power between certain individuals, and that this imbalance of power is an illusion, though the governments claim it is real.

There are better ways to serve the people than the use of governmental institutions. Private enterprise and volunteer work can be very gratifying.

Personal note to Terry:
I’ve been so busy reading the comments to this essay that I couldn’t think of anything to post on my own updated daily blog. Instead I wrote about you…http://halbrown.org
Thanks…

The way you shut up the mouths of people who do not support Hillary is so upsetting just like what those leftist media do. What I see is a majority of media suppressing the negative information about Hillary and deleting the comments and search results going against her. It is these people who are “refusing to acknowledge the emperor’s nakedness”.

First – the idea that there’s some conspiracy from Google and other search machines to in for the tin hat crowd who read World Net Daily and Prison Planet. Second, Hillary is the most scrutinized candidate we’ve ever had. Trump’s rants about her are aimed at people who don’t have the smarts to realize, for example, that there’s nothing conceivable she could have done in the email brouhaha that could land her in prison. I believe she made mistakes which I won’t bother listing; but I believe she has learned from them.

Additionally, there is something I must completely dispute with Terry: The idea that most of his supporters support him because they think he is qualified. They support him because he reflects their viewpoint on reality, regardless of qualification.

Donald Trump has an approval rating similar to what Nixon had at the time of his resignation (and had similar supporters). It’s common knowledge, even amongst many of his supporters, that he is unqualified to be president. Many of them are of the opinion that he will hire qualified advisors who will help him sort things out, and that he will run the country like a company which he wants to succeed, and point to his business record. They are further willing to overlook his deficiencies out of hostility towards the growing nonwhite population of the United States. Yes, there are a lot of racists in this country. It is taboo to express such views, but they are everywhere.

I think you might have trouble accepting that many people can be very openly aware of Trump’s many deficiencies and still support him, and that it’s just a matter of pointing out his failings as Hillary did in her speech. Perhaps unlike many of your readers, I know several Trump supporters, including one who is an immigrant with a PhD. These people are truly disillusioned with the system, feel they are not represented by either party, and are willing to risk having an obviously unqualified person as president because having “qualified” presidents has failed them and their families over many years. Was George W. Bush qualified? He gave us Iraq and the economic meltdown. Trump pointed it out over and over in the primaries and he ended out winning. It’s not a question of common vs mutual knowledge. It’s an issue of total disillusionment with politics and a willingness to go to extreme measures to “fix” the problem.

And to make it clear, I am not a Trump apologist. I’m voting for the first time in over a decade solely to vote against him.

“Many of them are of the opinion that he will hire qualified advisors who will help him sort things out, and that he will run the country like a company which he wants to succeed, and point to his business record.”

I know you’re not an apologist, but I just wanted to point out that if the people who he’s hired for his campaign are any indication, he will not hire anything close to “the best” people, and probably wouldn’t heed their advice even if he did.

There’s also good reason to believe his business record is nowhere near as successful as he claims because he won’t release his tax returns. In addition, the stinginess with which he’s spent money his primary campaign and his imminent dependence on big donors to fund his general election campaign, suggest that he’s not as wealthy as he claims. He might not even be a billionaire.

One of his biographers, Tim O’Brien, was unsuccessfully sued by Trump for reporting that Trump is not a billionaire. O’Brien is one of the few people who has been privy to Trump’s tax returns.

You need a third kind of knowledge, call it ‘mutual delusion’, for the people who believe the Emperor is clothed. There us no deliberate method for either the mutually knowing or the mutually delusional to ‘flip’ their counterparts, they can only wait for the spread of common knowledge.

Most of what I know about being president comes from The West Wing. Bartlet was perfectly presidential while unconscious from being shot. Does Trump have the minimal intelligence required to take counsel and delegate? I believe so. Speaking as a narcissist, nothing makes me look better than a competent staff.

Thanks for writing this Dr. Tao; more scientists and mathematicians need to be speaking up about this unmitigated disaster, even if we are largely speaking to a choir… silence and accommodation does not have a good history. It’s bad enough that some in the science arena defend Republicans, but defending Trump is beyond the pale.

I think Donald Trump can win if he can persuade enough people to vote for him. Democrats and other Republicans grossly underestimated how many people reason like him, or in the presence of someone like him. Such populations have always existed latent in American society (and across the world). Then at any given time, they can express themselves.

It is a defect of reasoning of we feel there is only one type of candidate that can be successful.

Some of the comments here remind me of an old New Yorker cartoon with a caption that proclaimed “Logic, the last refuge of a scoundrel!”
That said a better analogy might be a need for a phase transition in public perception of Mr. Trump. There are some promising signs that it could finely be happening. We can hope anyway… In the meantime, thanks for speaking out.

I think this raises a relevant point. People who recognize Trump and all of his flaws have trouble recognizing the flaws in their preferred candidate, even if the flaws are similar to those of Trump. Hillary Clinton is the wife of a former president, a former cabinet member, and was the sole serious candidate the Democrats were able and willing to put forth. (I consider Sanders to be an outsider.) This too really is not very democratic. Trump supporters would argue that people’s fears of authoritarianism under Trump have already been effectively realized. An entrenched system where ultimate insiders are only permitted to run for office. Recall that before the campaign season started, the most popular expectation was that it would be another Clinton vs Bush election. What democracy?

What of course Trump supporters do not realize is that there are things worse than “the system”, and that Trump is in that category. But I think there is some not recognizing the naked emperor in the anti-Trump camp, because their views are more aligned with those of the establishment. But if you live in a rural town with limited job opportunities and a heroin epidemic, hearing the anointed Official Next President say how great America is today, maybe you’d look for any alternative you can find.

As it happens, my view is that he *is* qualified; therefore it de facto cannot be *common knowledge* that he isn’t.

(More technically, whether someone is “qualified” for a job is purely a subjective opinion; as far as I know the usual “blue eyed islanders” common knowledge setup is not really appropriate for reasoning about such beliefs.)

(Then you insist that your assertion about Trump’s qualifications is somehow an objective truth, and then I point out that you’re essentially making a religious statement of faith, and then we’re at an impasse.)

Mathematically, what you are saying is that TT’s argument is circular: his religious belief is that @realdonaldtrump is unqualified. Therefore he is unqualified! It gets better (a la Monty Python): anyone who believes Donald IS qualified, is obviously delusional, and should not be listened to. Sigh.

Bill – what proof is there that Hillary Clinton hor her husband has ever done anything illegal? None. I hate them, for all their extreme rightwing bias in favor of the billionaire Wall Street class. For hunting animals. For NAFTA. For being pro-corporate welfare. For not freeing prisoners.
But, there is no evidence that they ever did anything illegal.

All the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) deniers have only themselves to blame when people openly declare that there is absolutely no proof whatsoever for anything. The Holocaust, 9/11, anyone ever dying, anything “illegal”, terrorism, the moonlanding, anti-vax.

The Principle of Explosion in Logic is the #1 Law of the universe.
It outranks ALL other human & physical & mathematical laws.

So all you stupid conservatives have NO business LECTURING ANYONE to
worship & kiss the asses of “the troops”. Because NOBODY has to accept your THEORY that paid government soldiers have “hard” jobs, or that they fight for my “freedom” rather than against it. When they bomb a prison that holds me hostage, then you can claim they fight “for” my freedom.

Until then, I will decide who is courageous & has a hard job & who is fighting for freedom rather than against it.

So if I am understanding you correctly…your claim is that there are lots of people out there who think that Trump is “unfit” (whatever that means), but would vote for him, unless they found out that other people consider him unfit as well? Or that if all the people who think he is unfit somehow banded together and were more public than they already have been about him being unfit, then those who currently consider him unfit would change their minds? I think there’s little evidence for either proposition.

I am shocked that a person as intelligent as Terry Tao can be so unwise as to believe that life can be axiomatized, or that his axioms can be so misguided. I completely agree with Ken(neth) on what the qualifications are, and it is clear that Trump has them. It is also clear that while Trump is clearly less experienced in (say) foreign policy than Clinton, her experience has been one of unremitting failure – some would argue that this would make Trump more qualified. There is also the historical record: Obama had absolutely no qualifications for anything when elected (and has been a disaster, in my opinion, but he did get elected twice). George Bush had no foreign policy experience whatever, and again got elected twice. Bill Clinton’s only experience when elected was as a (corrupt) governor of a back-woods state. His foreign policy record turned out to be mediocre at best. He also got re-elected. GHW Bush was actually very experienced. He did not get re-elected.Anyway, I will not rehash wikipedia here, but just say that the vast majority of US presidents had no foreign policy qualifications whatever when elected. That’s democracy for you. You don’t like democracy, and like the “philosopher king” model? Well, that’s what they practice in France, and it is a disaster.

You are a fucking subhuman dumbass hypocrite rightard if you force laws upon other people, but then CRY & WHINE over animal rights activists & vegans HYPOTHETICALLY passing laws against you eating me.

Only SUBHUMAN TRASH WITH NO FEELINGS vote republican or deomcrat.

Only SUBHUMAN TRASH WITH NO FEELINGS whine more about HYPOTHETICAL laws but say nothing about EXISTING UNJUST laws,
such as fossil fuel companies (coal, oil, gas) & meat industry getting
BILLIONS of dollars in free welfare from taxpayers to DESTROY
the country & civilization & technological progress just to make
subhuman reps & dems rich by climate change
and breed & torture & murder billons of animals.

Who the FUCK are you to demand that I praise & honor
paid government soldiers, no matter whether I agree or disagree
with whatever particular war they’re fighting?

Who the FUCK are you to demand that I praise & honor
paid government police, to imprison & take away my freedoms?

Who the FUCK are you to dictate to me
that I mustn’t support ARMED VIOLENT REVOLUTION
against fossil fuel addiction & the breeding of billions of animals for meat & fur?

The #1 FUNDAMENTAL BULLSHIT that conservatards
are too stupid to get through their heads:
that it is ok & heroic & justified when soldiers in YOUR nation
kill & maim & bomb & gun down the enemy
& ok if civilians long in the past or in OTHER nations
may use violent armed revolution to end an injust,
but “not ok” if civilians were to use violent armed uprising
in YOUR NATION RIGHT NOW.

No. Sorry. Police & soldiers have easy “jobs”.
It is just a THEORY that their jobs are hard.

It’s rightwing conservatives – i.e. muslims, the military, police,
all mainstream media, governments – who have ONLY THEMSELVES
TO BLAME when antinatalist animal rights vegan supporters
don’t take THEIR non-existent unimportant causes seriously,
don’t give a fuck about “terrorism” or rape or racism or sexism
or false accusations of rape/racism, etc –

They DEFEND the status quo of ignoring animal rights
& climate rights because they deny the reality or
do the Fallacy of Relative Privation (FRP).

So TOO fucking bad that nobody will believe their FALSE THEORIES
that cops & judges & prison guards & the military soldiers “suffer stress”. There is NO proof NO evidence that
ANYONE has EVERY done anything “illegal” in the history of the world.
That is just fearmongering BULLSHIT to take away our freedoms.

If you want to torture & murder animals for meat & destroy the climate
for future people & the poor right now, YOU should be gunned down,
tortured & killed for YOUR STUPID SELFISH cause.

FUCK you – I have ZERO obligation to believe in this myth called “terrorism” or “terrorist”. Just fearmongering words that freeloading
extortionist judges, lawyers & cops use. Even mentally inferior
subhuman shithead Alex Jones, conspiracy idiot & AGW-denier,
stands up to big government using the “terrorism” excuse to
take away our freedoms.

Glad to see so many downvotes: that means I am telling the truth
that the extreme rightwing media never talks about.

This is a well-thought and well-written post, both in the obvious opposition to Donald Trump and his dangerous racist, anti women, anti-democratic and violent rhetoric and actions, and in the timely support of Hillary Clinton who can stop Trump. Yes she can!

Mr. Tao, I think the crux of your argument lies in whether Trump’s carefree displays of ignorance and uncouth behavior are genuine or calculated. You assume the former, asserting that is incompetence must be mutual knowledge but an emperors-new-clothes scenario is preventing people from admiting it.

In fact, I don’t think we can assume mutual knowledge based on the evidence we have. His supporters don’t seem beffudled. They argue very clearly that their candidate has demonstrated throughout his campaign to be shrewed and confident in a manner that makes him look fit for office. And when analyzing Trump’s run over the last year a pattern emerges which seems to substantiate this. Every one of his more jarrying declarations or attacks turned out to have a positive outcome for him. When he called Mexican immigrants “rapists” everyone assumed it was the death knell to his campaign – but it gave him a projection in media whose benefits outstripped our indignation, making him shine among reactionary sects of American society, at a time when other candidates didn’t have a well-established following. So this and many other outbursts gave him a headstart in the race – he has since toned them down considerably. His attacks on his opponents had always a devastating effect: every time one of them was poised to finally take down “the clown”, Trump would successfully brand him as week (Low-Energy Jeb), unprepared (Little Marco) or dishonest (Lying Ted). Again, now that he has clinched the nomination he’s all cordiality and good-will toward his Republican peers.

Let’s agree that Trump is gleefuly ignorant, bigoted, crass, etc, and even that Proposition 1 is valid – he’s unfit for the Presidency. But can it be said that what I described before was done by chance? Doesn’t it rather seem like he was ingenuously manipulating the media in his favor? You would have to predicate a considerable number of happy coincidences to view his behaviour as random – logic would perhaps dictate a more simple explanation. After all, a man might be an ignoramus and still be astute. Trump has led many to see his underhanded tactics of manipulations as a sign of ingenuity and strategical ability. So, even though Proposition 1 might be valid, I don’t think it can be said for certain that his incompetence is mutual knowledge – which means it’s unlikely to became common knowledge, as you hope.

I’d also like to say something about your “et quoque” clause. While I understand your motive, the fact is most people don’t vote because they support one candidate, but rather because they dislike the alternative. So if you remove “et quoque” from the equation you won’t be able to see the big picture. In fact, you can’t fully explain Trump’s success without facing Mrs. Clinton’s shortcomings.

P.S: I agree that Trump’d be a terrible President. I hope it’s clear none of this was an endorsement. In fact I’m concerned ignoring the man’s obvious political talents will help clear his path to the White House – and so far it’s been easy peachy, I fear.

This is how a would-be president talks? This is from just one article in Huffington Post about Trump’s changing positions. – Saith the little boy who doesn’t know to keep his mouth shut “the emperor has no clothes and talks Palinesque gibberishy word salad.” (A new phase coined just for Trump.)

“I didn’t mind surgical. And I said surgical. You do a surgical shot and you take him out.” Face the Nation

“We would be so much better off if Gaddafi were in charge right now. If these politicians went to the beach and didn’t do a thing and we had Saddam Hussein and we had Gaddafi in charge, instead of having terrorism all over the place, we’d be — at least they killed terrorists, alright?” Trump in February

“It’s horrible what’s going on; it has to be stopped. We should do it on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives.”

“I was for something, but I wasn’t for what we have right now. I wasn’t for what happened. Look at the way — I mean look at with Benghazi and all of the problems that we’ve had. It was handled horribly … I was never for strong intervention. I could have seen surgical, where you take out Gaddafi and his group.”

One of the best things about mathematical culture is that there’s no shame in presenting a proof that you honestly believe is solid, but actually isn’t, and then correcting/retracting your statement in the face of counterarguments.

I appreciate your taking a position against Trump, and yet I think your analysis misses some important points.

1) The Trump phenomenon is not just a consequence of the voting system: different voting systems have produced similar results, lately. For instance here in Italy Mr. Berlusconi was PM several times, and Trump really looks like a conformal copy of Berlusconi;

2) logic often plays very little role in politics, so trying to analyze politics through the lenses of rational thought in the end might be misleading.

I do not follow the us campaign in detail, but it seems to me that given the somewhat provocative or erratic statements that trump makes, it is probably fairly hard to predict how things would go should he be elected

Where is your evidence? Even so it is a bunk claim, because those who have been president who are “fit” for office have not done what was necessary. If I put a key into a machine and it just electrocutes me. I am going to willingly not put a key that fits into the machine, and try to gum up or jam the keyhole so it doesn’t happen again.
“Trump isn’t a politician, he can’t be president.”
That is why he ought to be president. You have to go back.

The American presidential election system is much more the product of ad hoc evolution than intelligent design. It’s so complicated that it seems hardly plausible that it’s a great choice. On the other hand, it may or may not be a terrible choice, in general.

I personally am more enthusiastic about approval voting than runoff voting, instant or otherwise. My impression is that approval voting is centrist, while runoff voting is fairly non-centrist. However, I am no expert in this topic.

It seems hard to argue that “anything but the American system” (among modern voting systems) necessarily works very well to prevent the election of terrible leaders. Trump has been compared to Berlusconi, who came to power in Italy in a reasonable standard proportional representation system. Proportional representation is has an obvious mathematical motivation, certainly more so than the American system. But an abstractly compelling solution to any applied problem can be too clever by half in the real world; it can be worse than a much more arbitrary ad hoc solution.

Maybe partly to be provocative, I could argue that the Republican primary this year was a quasi-runoff system that knocked out wiser, more centrist choices in favor of two unqualified populists as the last men standing.

Certainly the American voters now have an important responsibility to elect someone else (presumably Clinton) instead of Trump. But I’m not sure that that dramatic concern shows weaknesses in our election system, even though I certainly agree that it has weaknesses.

Your preamble was irrelevant and weakened the blog post by making it inaccessible to all but the choir. Why say it openly, if they are your only audience. What you needed to say was what you eventually said:

I feel that it is time for the charade to end: Trump is unfit to be president, and everybody knows it. But more people need to say so, openly.

While I agree with the general sentiment of the article, I believe the concern is slightly misplaced. Mr Trump is a horrible person expressing horrible views based more on a media impact and ratings ala reality television than a politician. He is a thoroughly modern candidate perfectly suited to our modern, vacuous, anti-intellectual, and anti-eite populace. He is most likely committing the single great con job in the history of the Nation. If so he has a certain level of talent while awful and malignant, it is certainly historic in caliber.

He isn’t the real problem. The real problem is the number of Americans willing to vote for him. Without their willingness to vote for such an utterly and completely repugnant human the problem of Mr. Trump’s suitability for office becomes moot. The level of vile world view, intolerant and/or racist sentiments, and outright ignorance of the voting public is an indictment of the American population, educational system and culture. This should be the target of our collective ire and fear. If not, Trump they will elect someone who is even worse.

Trump was heralded by another blithering idiot Sarah Palin. She was one of many completely incompetent, anti-intellectual know-nothings to be elected to a variety offices across the nation at all levels of government. Trump is simply the natural step backward from the political horror show unfolding for the last three decades.

People who make the argument that Mrs. Clinton is the same or worse than Trump are the same ones duped by our poisonous political process. We are being played for fools by Trump and the media. Mrs. Clinton is by no means perfect or perhaps even desirable in a perfect World. We don’t live in a perfect world as the viability of Mr. Trump’s candidacy terrifyingly proves.

This is neither a solid piece of mathematical reasoning nor a well-articulated piece of political commentary. I’m not sure which Mr. Tao intended it to be. All it boils down to is a mere assertion of his politics couched in logical form (use of the pretentious phrasing “proposition 1”) as though this were something to be deductively proven.

Mr. Tao should also tell us what he believes would constitute a remote qualification – the words used in “proposition 1”. Since apparently this proposition is going to be proven to deductive certainty, one should expect a full fleshing-out of the word “qualified” here, so as to prevent ambiguity. I might recommend a checklist format to assure complete transparency. In addition, Mr. Tao should feel free to speculate as to why each of the qualifications on this imagined checklist are necessary to hold office.

Nonetheless, it is always quite lively to point out that even those academically-minded people, where people naively expect them to hold sophisticated thoughts in fields outside their occupation, end up doing nothing more than regurgitating trivialities. Here, we observe Mr. Tao’s espousal of the trivial statement “Trump is unfit for office (whatever “fit” means)” along with a case which is made no better than a bungling political commentator. It will also be amusing to see particle physicists, organic chemists, algebaists, and other academics step outside their limited domains of expertise to offer us their opinions and guts feeling, masquerading as sophisticated and informed political positions.

I am not sure that the mutual/common knowledge distinction applies to Trump supporters so much as Sanders supporters. It is mutual knowledge that Bernie Sanders has lost the Democratic primary, but it is not common knowledge yet.

After Tuesday and California’s primary it will become common knowledge that he has lost and that will likely lead to his conceding the contest.

I’m going to have to outright reject your premise altogether because you aren’t working from provable fact, but a narrative constructed from facts, which itself is composed largely of something I would call half-truths. See here for a well constructed counter narrative using the same set of facts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw8c2Cq-vpg

The idea that people will look at the same set of facts and can derive similar conclusions is a flawed one. What your argument misses is that many people who support Trump simply cannot say so lest they be branded with the same bywords (racist, sexist, islamophobe)of the popular media narrative. You seem to be mistaking the current era group censorship as people accepting the idea that this is “common knowledge” that Trump cannot lead is a flawed one. You see, you yourself face ZERO real-world backlash for writing a blog post criticizing Trump whereas anyone from an academic on down to a factory worker could face social and even career repercussions for endorsing Trump in even hushed, non-committal tones. Your error is mistaking this media enforced social bubble as solid ground from which to derive fact. You yourself may have friends and co-workers who have looked at his policies and determined that he is the one they most agree with. They would never tell YOU though. For you see, the only “common knowledge” is that publicly ENDORSING Trump is anathema.

To declare Trump for all his bombacity to be unfit for the office of president, more or less displays a historical ignorance of the characters of people who have held the office.

People like Scoundrels. They also like successful people. Trump is both.

I think you are truly overestimating the public’s trust in the media and equating it with your own possibly censored social feedback. It really resonates poorly with some when Trump is attacked unfairly (e.g. Trump had 4 casinos file for bankruptcy in Atlantic city, whose gaming and resort industry completely crumbled not long after he left – the problems were not unique to Trump); out of about 515 entities and companies he controls – this last part is usually left off to paint him a some sort of ineffective charlatan, by people like John Oliver, who is an actual charlatan when it comes to making his case against Trump).

The man has turned millions into billions and survived many recessions, on top of the fact that he has been espousing the same economic policies since the 80s and the last slew of ineffective leaders seem to despise him.

That is enough for most people – however it is not “common knowledge”. Yet.

One could say we have got a scoundrel in both parties and one of the two has a whole family history of scoundrelry. And we Americans will have the option to give our nation a total of 12 years from this family of villains and have the man assume the dual role of president and first man. In fact, it may give us the opportunity to see the Clintons carefully select their interns to Bill’s tastes and also see to it that the oval office turn into one big cathouse.

You may have just neglected to add Reagan at the end of his term when he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. However of those you do list, only Nixon before he resigned and was drinking was too mentally unstable to be president. I argue that Trump is now mental unstable what with having a narcissistic personality disorder with enough characteristics to make it clinically significant to impair his judgment. I also did a little amateur handwriting analysis and based on just one letter it occurred to me that instead of being a conscious liar he is engaging in a lot of self-deceit. Check my blog….
By the way, I’m not a mathematician like just about all of you. I’m a retired clinical social worker and former mental heath center director who was led to this blog by my physicist friend.

I am working on the phrenology now but it is more difficult than graphology. I figure I may get good at it in eight or so years. While it has been calculated by someone, who like some who comment here wants to remain anonymous, that handwriting breaks down personality into a mere 300 types based on only 9,245 styles of letters and 345 other characteristics, analysis of the lumps and bumps and numerous locations where the same bump in location A may mean something entirely different in location B etc. in exponentially more difficult. Check out the chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology#/media/File:PhrenologyPix.jpg
You can take an online course in graphology for under $100 and declare yourself an expert, or just fake up a diploma and announce that you’re an expert. To learn phrenology you have to be self taught, track down old texts, and find numerous subjects to practice on.

Seriously, the handwriting experts to actually make handwriting comparisons for law enforcement are probably do have some expertise.

I should think that the candidates will be very interested to know what those bumps on their skull mean. I wish you luck on this particular endeavor. Personally, I look forward to reading their tea leaves.

I’d be interested in hearing why you see the Emperor and the Donald as parallel. If a statement from a child can establish common knowledge in one case, why can’t explanations from Romney and many more do it in the other?

Also, the Australian system has a big flaw, to my mind. This can happen: Take the winning candidate and raise that person in some voter’s preference ranking. Rehold the vote, and that candidate now loses. That’s perverse.

Thank you for writing this. Sorry you are getting so much hate. Sometimes people forget/ignore that as mathematicians/scientists we have a duty to the world beyond just advances in our chosen discipline, and it is very heartening to see someone held in such high mathematical esteem taking this very seriously!

Surely, you mean “criticism”, not “hate”. No one here hates Mr. Tao and he is held in high esteem as an intellectual. However, if a professional academic steps into the political realm, he will be held to the same standards as anyone else. That means a poorly made case will be quickly sniffed out and attacked.

Not a single one of the Trump defenders here have articulated a solid case that Trump would make a good POTUS. This is a pattern with them. I’ve heard much of these mystical mastikal “intelligent Trump voters,” but they seem as difficult to locate as Bigfoot.

Prof. Tao basically says that Hillary’s speech is one “proof” among many that Trump is not qualified to be president, saying that Mitt Romney among other prominent people from both parties have also made this case. Tao neglected to mention that another prominent mathematician named Stephen Hawking also said the same thing: “He is a demagogue who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator.” This was originally reported in the AP but since embargoed since it was released it before the tape was due to be released. You can find the article here however:http://bigstory.ap.org/article/c562d36dc0ea4e9eb6e7cfe155e1a6c7/physicist-stephen-hawking-baffled-donald-trumps-rise-0

From your posted proof, I see that you are not only a genius in Math, but also a genius in Politics. Maybe you have expertises in many other fields that we are not awaring of now but we would gradually see down the road. Given this post I would not be surprised if you go to Rio this summer and win some gold medals in the Olympics. Because you are a genius in Math so presumably you must be a genius in every other subjects/fields. Btw, do you have any other similar proof that shows whether any incumbents of any significant positions are not fit for their positions? If there were a lot, did you go back to check your proof? The danger here is that many folks repecting your work in Math tend to consider your opinions on other unrelated issues correct. That could be true, but is not guaranteed.

Trump is the preseident that US needs now, and his politics he is succesfully proposing is so new that you fail to understand it. After the fall of Soviet Union, left parties abandoned supporting workers and degenerated into cultural Marxism and victimocracy (namely hating white men and painting women as victims, illegal immigrants as victims, homosexuals as victims…), fighting against free speech. After 25 years of this nonsense workers are understanding that the left turned into their enemy, and Trump is proposing that the former religious right will now defend their intererest. What we now see is a historical shift of voters from the corrupt left to something new that is badly needed.

I think it’s safe to say Proposition 1 is not an actual proposition (even though you framed like it is); it’s an opinion at best.

But that’s not my main point here. My point is where is your rigor in this regard as we usually see in your posts and papers. Specifically, even if it’s a proposition, where are definitions of “qualification”, “remotely”, etc? And where is the proof?

Prof. Tao, it’s common knowledge that you have a lot of fans/followers, and you influence many people in different ways (whether it’s regarding math or not). So I hope, in the future, instead of making your point look like a rigorous argument by phrasing it as a proposition, you could actually apply the same rigor shown in your math blogs/papers to other things you comment on (not to the same extent, of course), especially when it’s posted in this MATH blog. This is because many people value your opinions, which they take seriously. And after all, you have great power (your intellectual, reputation and influence), so there must also come great responsibility.

BTW, Google+ might be a better place for this kind of posts. Just my 2 cents.

Like many examples of “applied mathematics” the way to judge Tao’s propositions is to what extent they contribute to understanding the situation. I think that the idea that there are many people who personally tend to see Trump as unfit but do not realize the extent that this is a wide held assessment rather than expressing ordinary politically-based claims before an election is very relevant to the situation at hand.

Of course, Trump himself contributes to the the crucial step from private to common knowledge (among many). For example, when he refers to a judge overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University as biased because of his Mexican heritage.

We can hope that the crucial turning point in assessing Mr. Trump will happen well before the election rather than after.

There is just one requirement to be fit for the US Presidency and that is if the majority of delegates vote for you over your contenders. Trump has already sealed the nomination making him more qualified than every other Republican who chose to run. Policies and what Trump or anyone else says is irrelevant to this fact.

However since you did use speeches to make your case so will I. Trump doesn’t have to order the wall built, he doesn’t have to ban Muslim immigration he doesn’t have to follow through with a single thing he’s said. The reason however, for him to say these things is because it is what the working class wants to hear and are willing to vote for. It is the basis of populism. You may find it uncouth but the working class have been betrayed by their leaders many times and are naturally rebelling away from the people who resemble them. Who better than a billionaire who appears to share their views while having the power and wealth to follow through with them?

You see the fatal flaw with your case for common knowledge is the assumption that it is common at all. You assume it is common so you choose to believe it rather than ask those voting for him if they share your common knowledge or have their own common knowledge which runs counter to yours.

Since your proposition based entirely on common knowledge is now debunked I shall go a step further and inform you that even if it was common knowledge that Trump is not fit to rule that does not mean there is no reason to vote for him above all others.
Politics is a game of appeasement not one of logic and mathematics. By voting for Trump your vote becomes a display for all other republicans that in future to claim your vote their mannerisms and proposals must be more Trumpish. In this way even if you do not believe in Trump but believe in what Trump preaches it’s in your interest to vote for him so next time a leader who is qualified to rule will champion those beliefs.

Please stick to mathematics, if you honestly thought the post you made held water in the emotionally not logically driven world of politics you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Proposition 1. The presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, is not even remotely qualified to carry out the duties of the presidency of the United States of America.

I agree with this statement. However there is fundamental flaw in this reasoning. It assumes that Presidents are lone cowboys responsible for all duties the POTUS is assigned by law. In reality many duties of POTUS are delegated to other people, thus POTUS capabilities are dependent on other factors, such as his advisors and people he surrounds himself with.

We could create simple equation with POTUS value being low, but add additional values for people in his cabinet compensating for the lower value of POTUS. Same thing vice-versa.

What I’m saying here is the president is as good as his advisors are. I have reason to believe that advisors Trump will pick will be good.

An case which excellently illustrates the distinction of those forms of knowledge and how bad things go if Terry’s proposed move between them does not happen is the science fraudster Meinertzhagen: “Everyone knew” that e was a criminal, so the museum staff in the tv episode below was asked to observe him secretly on visits, but as he was a public figure of highest esteem, his frauds damaged science seriously. Acc. to his biography below, his criminal behaviour was s well known that parents threatened their kids to obey orders, because “else Meinertzhagen comes to you”: http://edge.channel4.com/news/2005/11/week_3/16_tring.wmv , http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2007/03/23/the-meinertzhagen-mystery-the/

I’ve counted 137 comments so far — not a huge sample size, but enough to do some non-trivial statistics. Project for an eager undergrad: classify the comments into (+) agreeing and (-) disagreeing with the post, and into signed (S) vs. anonymous (A). [This one would be anonymous, since the author is *hopefully* not easily identifiable.] What percentage of the (+)comments are anonymous vs. the same percentage for (-)? Any thoughts on why people would be unwilling to go on record either disagreeing with a famous mathematician or supporting Trump? I certainly know my reasons…

many think he does not have necessary and sufficient experience and or knowledge to do a acceptable job as president for at least 51% of the population, this has nothing to do with qualifications to be on the ballot as one of the named candidates (or in general to be counted as an eligible candidate )

there are three qualifications in the constitution:
“age, residency, and citizenship—that must be satisfied at the time of taking office.”

it is common knowledge that he meets these three qualifications

how good or bad of a job someone will do if they are elected president is entirely a different matter, it is subjective, not objective. Most presidents have lower than 70% approval rating, if it is an academic class, that is a fail.

who decides which people are fit to be president, the voters will, that is how democracy works.

for example, the voters decided that Sarah Palin was unfit to be president by not voting for her in sufficient enough numbers, however, she met the qualifications to be president so that votes for her are counted as valid.

all this aside, to your point, getting the vote is a major part of becoming the president, and all the republican candidates, regardless of how fit they are in other respects, have proven beyond all doubt, they are profoundly unfit to get the vote.

just imagine how much more profoundly unfit you would have to be at getting votes, for Trump, who is profoundly unfit at everything else, to get significantly more votes.

if common people are simple enough to be fooled by Trump, it should not be overwhelmingly difficult to figure out what they want and give it to them. each candidate knew how important it is to get the vote. if a candidate is not fit enough to figure out how to beat Trump in the polls, I don’t think that person is fit enough to be president.

It is the candidates job to convince the people they are fit. The polls are an accurate indicator of how convinced the people are.

If it was J. Biden or E. Warren, I would vote for them rather than Trump on their character alone, but I would rather vote for Trump than Clinton, so that maybe after 4 years of Trump, they will feel enough of a need to run for president to give the people what they really want.

I would rather vote for T. Tao than D. Trump, but T. Tao has not announced that he is running.

is T. Tao more or less unfit to be president than D. Trump. How should I know.

All I know is that D. Trump is qualified to be president according to the constitution.

Bringing `morals’ into a discussion about Trump’s qualifications sounds a bit strange, don’t you think? I am undecided because I think Trump might be a good president, but even his supporters would not mistake him for a model if morality.

I am an independent who generally votes D across the board. This is not a contradiction. I don’t feel tied to Democrats and, when they screw up, I am not defending them. I will try to explain why I am undecided between these two options: (A) vote D across the board; (B) vote for Trump and D otherwise.

My biggest problem with both parties is that, over time, the idea of what it means to be a Democrat or Republican became so rigid that politicians are now completely defined by these boundaries, even when it makes no sense. This is particularly pronounced in foreign policy (and here I don’t distinguish between D and R), where politicians treat countries and regions by inertia as if we still live in the middle of the last century. They twist themselves in knots not to admit that their position is incongruent with reality, driven by nothing other than political calculations. (To give an example, I would prefer if the US and the EU were friends with Russia instead of Saudi Arabia.)

Mrs. Clinton is a great example of such a rigid politician, and it is truly ironic than her biggest claim to being qualified is that she was the country’s Top Diplomat. If she wants someone like me to vote for her, she should stop emphasizing her inflexibility by focusing on partisan attacks. She should instead emphasize how her policies would address the concerns of all people, including those on the other side.

Mr. Trump is far less rigid, but he also needs to show that he is willing to listen to people on the other side, especially because he is so uniquely positioned to be the bridge between R and D. For example, if he is elected president and it becomes clear how unrealistic his idea to build the wall is, he is uniquely positioned to move GOP to support the national ID law. By the same logic, he is also uniquely positioned to make the rich pay more taxes. Now that the primaries are over, he needs to show that he is ready to adopt good policies of the Democrats. I want to see him move to the middle, and move GOP to the middle with him.

I know that it sounds like wishful thinking and one can argue that we should take politicians at their word. Perhaps. And maybe I will vote for Mrs. Clinton in the end, despite the fact that her judgement is often overruled by political calculations. But at this point my mind is open, and my decision will not be based on an abstract definition of who is qualified or not qualified.

[…] and Northern Ireland being dragged into the slipstream) with Boris Johnson at it’s helm. Yet, like Donald Trump, it should be clear for all that Johnson isn’t fit to govern and should be held in the utmost […]

The constitution does not address “qualification” in the manner you speak. Eligibility is what it addresses. Trump is eligible. Everything else is up to the voters.

As far as I can tell, your Proposition is akin to all the adults telling the Emperor how beautiful his clothes are. Because in the privacy of the polling booth, the voters are saying something entirely different. However qualified Trump is, what do you think that says of Cruz, Bush, Walker, Fiorina, et al that he so easily beat them? Are they more qualified in your book? If they are more qualified, why would the voters be choosing the less qualified individual? The multiple candidates certainly help explain some early success, but how do you explain Indiana?

Donald Trump is proof that:
1. Everyone should NOT be allowed to vote. Some level of competence should be demonstrated before every election/vote. People that seek to destabilize the world to further their own interests at the expense of others are indeed terrorists. Racists $\subset$ terrorists should not be allowed to vote.
2. Reparations and financial embargoes are necessary for this country to move forward. He has millions of supporters (they are all white supremacists- regardless of their race). Germany was punished for the holocaust, now they look upon the event with shame. Slavery was similar, however it took place over the course of 400 years. –
Donald Trump wants to make America “great” again. You can’t do that without hundreds of years of free labor.

As an engineer, my initial reaction to your blog post is “define qualified.” What is the measure of qualification for this office? The constitution is brilliantly clear on this, and by that measure Trump qualifies:

“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”

(ARTICLE II, SECTION 1, CLAUSE 5)

And what is the definition of the continuum upon which we find “not even remotely qualified?”

As a mathematician you certainly know that stating one’s premises is essential to making a case. I would like to know yours.

Wow, all the pathetic Trump apologists trying to blame this on a left-wing troll. It’s not as if Trump doesn’t receive plenty of genuine support from White supremacists and Neo-Nazis, but Trump supporters are fundamentally dishonest and prefer to whitewash (heh) that part.

You stand with Trump, you stand with David Duke, with Andrew Anglin and The Daily Stormer, with Kevin B. MacDonald, with Jared Taylor, with Richard Spencer, with William Johnson, all of whom have enthusiastically thrown their support behind Trump and have explicitly stated that he is mainstreaming their racist cause. You vote for Trump, you enable people like that. Those are the stakes, and no amount of sophistry will obviate that fact.

A) Trump meets the qualifications outlined in Article 2 Section 1 clause 5 of the constitution: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
B) All other qualifications are subjective. However common or mutual knowledge these perceived qualifications might be, they remain irrelevant.

Perhaps a better study would be to look at your personal defined POTUS qualifications and determine whether they are common or mutual knowledge?

Your claim of a canidate being unfit for presidency stems from his direct competitor’s speech. Isn’t trying to prove your fitness as opposed to your competition’s what campaigning is about?

Trump *still* hasn’t settled on his policy. That’s probably what’s behind his appeal not only to the frustrated lower middle class that falls for his promises, but to more affluent intellectuals (Peter Thiel being one), I suspect due to him swimming through the disappointment caused by buzzwords (reformer, results, hope, change) that never came to life in previous presidencies, ever since Clinton left office.

If previous candidates made false promises, what stops you from voting to one that put the practice to shame by pushing it as much as possible?

Besides, the presidential office does come with plenty of safety nets. Say Trump reverts the Iran deal (which was generally positive, in my opinion) and starts yet another war with a ridiculous price tag. In that case, there are political entities which may, on the condition of a majority vote, impeach him.

It’s about flipping a coin vs. settling for a combination of populism and aggressive foreign policy.

Tao’s Prop 1 is really just a vaguely defined opinion. Encasing Prop 1 in “For all n, (everyone knows that)^n[Prop 1]” escalates this expression of opinion to an emphatic but unempathic denial that reasonable and sensible people can differ in this opinion. The argument could only have worked if Prop 1 is replaced by a tautology like “Illegal immigration is illegal”.

It’s interesting that some here are debating what the qualifications are to be president by reducing them essentially to that one has to be a living America born citizen over a certain age. They are remiss in reminding us of the presidential oath (“I, name, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and I will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”)… which perhaps in view to the possibility that Trump may be reciting this should probably read “I, Donald Trump, do solemnly swear ( on the Bible or affirm on “The Art of the Deal”) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and I will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, defend, read, and understand the Constitution of the United States.”

It is instructive to read who a group of 10 historians from different political parties listed as the 10 most influential presidents since 1900. Love them or hate them, it is impossible for anyone but the most narrow minded to dispute that all 10 were very influential.

I would also add that substituting Trump with Obama, and John Oliver with Jon Stewart, using your methodology, one can also prove Mr. Obama is unfit to be POTUS; yet he was elected twice. What does this tell us?

Terry, I remember once you said in an interview that you’re good at subjects that were objective and had clearly right or wrong answers, but not so much on things that were subjective. I think that’s a fair and honest self-assessment.

I’m curious to hear from thoughtful Trump supporters what you think *your* nation should do if *another* nation’s democracy (which incidentally was the preeminent economic and military power worldwide) were to decisively position a Trump-analogue one step from that nation’s leadership.

Your answers may depend on whether relations were formerly friendly, neutral, or antagonistic, so feel free to elaborate. Any further measures you would advocate should the Trump-analogue actually be elected, are also of interest.

It is mutual knowledge that the 197th decade is the years 1961-1970. Still J.F.Kennedy considered it to be 1960-1969, which is the common knowledge. The one year early millenium celebration was an embarrassing display of false common knowledge. Where is the child to shout out that the president was mistaken?

the problem is that no matter how the voting system to get elected is changed it is probably not going to prevent significantly unfit presidents being elected

even out of the most seeming fittest to be president some prove they are unfit while in office, it is only by hindsight that we think we should have know better.

it is possible that some seeming unfit before election to do a better job than expected. (someone who has unspecific or unstated policy positions turning into more of a lame duck than a either pleasant or unpleasant surprise)

however, perhaps there should be an additional safeguard, automatic yearly recall elections for every president (and every elected official )

keep the current voting system to be elected as is (every 4 years)(in other words years divisible by 4), and max total term, but for each of the three years in between the 4 years, have a national ballot like this for each elected official:

1. should the current president be replaced immediately? yes no
2. if replaced, who should be the replacement?
please circle either yes or no for each candidate
for each candidate you circled yes to, please circle a preference
party 1 candidate 1 yes no 123456789…
party 1 candidate 2 yes no 123456789…
party 1 candidate 3 yes no 123456789…
…
party 2 candidate 1 yes no 123456789…
party 2 candidate 2 yes no 123456789…
…

(number of named candidates per party will be no less than those who have a 10% or more approval rating within their party taken exactly 30 days before date of recall election according to more than half of polling organizations approved by both major parties )

if 67% or more people who answered question 1 answered yes,
then whichever candidate gets the most yes vote will become the new president and take office 15 days after the date of this election

(if there is an exact tie, the candidate with the least no votes among the candidates that tied will break the tie, if there is still a tie after this, then a preferential system based on the weighted ranking (sum of reciprocals of number of preferences(1st,1st,3rd,2nd->1/1+1/1+1/3+1/2)), if there is still a tie, then each candidate who tied will serve a proportional continuous equal amount of time as president over a year long period )

I think something like this is the best safeguard.

Let the voters decide if the elected official if fit based upon the voters judgment of the elected officials performance.

Election of past “obviously unfit” media personalities such as Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura did not cause any disasters in office, which suggests that the definition of “not fit” is off-base. Trump has additional business experience that the others three did not have, in addition to the media exposure.

Trump is quite similar to the ex-governor Reagan, a pop-culture personality with some experience running things, whose appeal to the electorate is based on a combination of America First ideology, telegenic charisma and name recognition. And his policies run less of a risk of creating a nuclear war, which is always a plus. Had things run differently for the Soviet Union, such as the discovery of immense new oil resources on its territory, or severe economic problems in the West, the Reagan military buildup could have very well led to a war between nuclear superpowers or their proxies during the 1990’s. Trump by contrast seems a lot less aggressive in his foreign policy stances.

Reagan on the eve of his election to the US presidency was widely (though not universally) viewed as too old and close to senility to hold office, and he became medically and mentally unfit for office after the assassination attempt in 1981. The official diagnosis of full blown Alzheimer’s was not given until later in his presidency but his staff and his wife were propping him up after the assassination. The presidential debate performances in 1984 confirmed the suspicion that he was not fully present mentally. Before and after his election, Reagan had many gaffes that were interpreted (often correctly) as evidence of incompetence, and such things were noticed and compiled less often than in the Internet age.

Despite all these extraordinary qualification deficits for a sitting US president, Reagan was not any less effective than a super-qualified, smart (Oxford chemistry PhD) and micromanaging technocrat like Margaret Thatcher at pushing the essentially identical political program.

With this sort of background in mind I don’t see how Trump should not be taken seriously. The choice is between political programs and likely cabinets of the different candidates, as well as the candidates themselves, and for the latter one has to choose from the 2-3 electable presidential candidates, not compare Trump to an idealized “qualified candidate” who is not on the ballot.

I guess Terry just did not do enough homework in either history or politics before he posted his naive political “proposition”. With his talent I am sure he can pick up any intellectual subjects much quicker than almost all other people in the world. That said, he still needs to devote enough time, energy, and thoughts into that subject before he can gain anything profound. He used Trump’s opponents’ opinions as his sole evidence for his proposition. If this was his way of doing literature review in his research, that will be a disaster. Fortunately he didn’t.

You don’t think Ronald Reagan caused “any disasters in office”? His illicit support for the apartheid regime in South Africa, while it killed over one million people in wars with neighboring countries amid brutal internal repression, wasn’t a disaster? Reagan’s support for a fascist military dictatorship in Guatemala, which left 100,000 people dead, wasn’t a disaster? Reagan’s support for a similar dictatorship in El Salvador, which left 65,000 people dead, wasn’t a disaster? How about Reagan’s support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, who evolved into the terrorists who would go on to attack the United States? How about Reagan’s assistance to Pakistan in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, conceivably the greatest threat to life on earth today?

Your opinion of the Reagan administration (or Schwarzenegger or Ventura administrations’) policies is not really relevant to the issue of Trump’s qualifications. The issue as it concerns Reagan is whether there were any major problems during his presidency that are attributable to him being relatively unqualified or, after a certain point, mentally impaired.

Every “disaster” you listed did not begin during Reagan’s term in office, and involved a continuation of US policy from the previous administrations of objectively more qualified presidents such as Carter. In addition, every one of those cases was driven by Cold War geopolitics, and Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”, much less a state of war with the Islamic world, was not yet in focus as the successor to that conflict. Criticizing the consequences of US policy in Central Asia with the benefit of 30 years’ hindsight does not (necessarily) imply that at the time it was bad decision-making. It certainly does not imply that Carter or Mondale, who were the better-qualified alternatives to Reagan, would have made better decisions. It’s not as though Carter’s foreign policy decisions all look awesome in hindsight, either.

Dr. Tao, can you add John Oliver as a co-author on this piece of work? This will make the work more credible and attract more citations. It perhaps won’t lead to another Fields modal, but nonetheless a solid piece of work. Congrats!

You say that Trump is not qualified, but what do you mean by that? Do you suspect he has lied about his age and is younger than the 35 year minimum? Are you proposing that Trump is not a citizen? Maybe we should take a closer look at his birth certificate. I suspect that you are suggesting neither of these things. Although you say he is not qualified, what you mean is that he does not live up to your own personal standards for a president. Since you are referring to your own standards and not a universal standards, the idea that it can be known by everyone that these standards are not met is absurd. Clearly, millions of people feel that he either meets their own standards or that he comes closer than any other candidate. Not only is your article absurd, your attempts to dress it up as an exercise in logic are comical.

the candidates will probably are Clinton and Trump and each that each candidate will make VP choices better than Palin, say Sanders(or Biden) and Gingrich respectively.

now this should make democrats happy beyond belief.

an opponent they are sure they can beat in the election.

would it make democrats happier if the republicans had their own version of B Obama, a super fit superstar genius (remember when he was first elected he crushed H Clinton like a foot crushed an aluminum can).

Trump being the Republican nominee is the Republican party’s fault for not having better candidates. Who decides who is better, the voting people who are registered republicans do.

The people have spoken. They have spoken. That is the only real “qualifications” other than constitution 3, that matters in the American system. the people decide who is most qualified based on their vote.

if the experts disagree with the people, or did not understand the people enough to see Trump doing so well relative to the other candidates, then how much of an expert are they really???

the people, not only experts, decide by vote, because in the end the president serves the people not only experts.

Next election in 4 years, will the Republicans learn from their mistake?

The party is responsible for knowing its own base–that is the whole ball game, satisfying your party base. Ok it is good if you can convert some of the other party to vote for you candidate or more likely abstain, but if you don’t have the support of your base what is the point?

The republican base has sent a crystal clear message. Trump is more satisfying then the other republican candidates by a significant margin

that is who they have screamed for who they think is their best chance at winning compared with the other republican candidates.

do you really think he should be disqualified and be taken off the ballot because he does not meet some common sense fitness standard.

if you are republican, would you rather have the people who voted for Trump in the primaries vote for Clinton in the election because you took the republican majority favorite Trump off the ballot

if you are democrat, if the democrats cannot beat trump, who can they beat??? who do you think that Clinton would have a better chance of beating that is more fit than Trump???(this is a serious question)

if you are neither, do you really think it best to tell people they are not qualified or fit enough to vote because they are fooled by Trump and tell them their vote no longer matters and will no longer be counted?

on the objective merits of your post in light of your mathematical talent:

you did not define fit
you did not define qualified
you did not define duties

therefore the proposition is not well formed

further analysis is on the merits is no longer objective.

unless that is part of the puzzle, to deduce how reliant possible definitions are to the puzzle itself.

I think you were intending to informally state an analogy of how Trump being a nominee is similar in some way to a very easy logical puzzle

*there are simultaneously exactly two logically correct answers depending on what is meant by specific terms. because of this, it is undecidable*
that is the answer to the logic puzzle

you say “I feel that it is time for the charade to end”. are you saying that the American citizen voters should not be taken seriously, and that their vote not be counted???

are you intentionally trying to act the part of the outsider who does not know they should not speak about eye color and gives people info they can use to deduce that would lead them to the conclusion of suicide???

on the other hand, if you have someone Trump trusts, like time traveling trump from the future tell Trump he is unfit and trump believes it he is a suicide risk, that by extension the republicans will deduce because they voted for him are unfit or unqualified to be voters, and upon that realization, they will suicide themselves,

or do you mean figurative suicide of the Republican party, not literal individual suicide.

I think I get it now.

Because Republicans were fooled by McCain who demonstrated profoundly poor judgment in deciding on Palin thus showing the Republicans how truly unfit McCain was to be president even by Republican standards, and because this became common knowledge amount Republicans, Republicans kinda figuratively suicided their own party and the choice of Trump is simply an observed symptom of the dead decaying corpse of the Republican party.
(I disagree with this perspective, it could just as easily be a caterpillar before it finishes changing into a butterfly, but regardless, this perspective seems to be the only thing I can think of so far that seems to fit best)

is that the correct answer???

look, you are a super-genius at math, maybe in a few decades you will be among the all time greats like A. Einstein, or S. Ramanujan, so you are trying to be all zen like and teach something a different way.

this is kind of like trying to solve a mechanical puzzle.

please don’t forget to post the correct answer, or at least a clue. thank you.

Nobody should even have to say that there are no universal standards besides the meager ones spelled out in the Constitution. While not possible to conduct a person-to-person psychiatric diagnostic assessment of Donald Trump he gives mental health experts ample fodder for analysis as to his mental condition. When the framers wrote the Constitution nobody thought somebody not of “sound mind” would be elected president. So far the country has been lucky, and all our presidents, while some have had their quirks, none have been assessed as having had mental impairments are the beginning of their tenure. Donald Trump, as a number of psychotherapists more learned in making at-a-distance diagnosis than I am have noted, he is more than likely to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder. See “IS DONALD TRUMP ACTUALLY A NARCISSIST? THERAPISTS WEIGH IN!
As his presidential campaign trundles forward, millions of sane Americans are wondering: What exactly is wrong with this strange individual? Now, we have an answer.”
BY HENRY ALFORD

Dan McAdams, the author of “George W. Bush and the redemptive dream: A psychological portrait.” New York: Oxford University Press, doesn’t make a diagnosis. Instead he presents an in-depth analysis of what a Trump presidency would be like based on personality characteristics.

I hope (really truly do hope) that you recognize that what I wrote about phenology was tongue in cheek. Anyway, that you for remembering me,
probably your only non-mathematician posting here – unless some of those I shared this great blog with also post comments. Notice that the sources, The Atlantic, founded in 1857, and Vanity Fair (first published in 1983) have been around for awhile, since before the Internet became the Internet in fact —— way before in the case of The Atlantic.

I’m very disappointed to hear you’re not a true believer in phrenology, as I was very much looking forward to your impression of Trump’s skull impressions. I gave your comment a “thumbs down” just because.

Six thumbs down, and counting. OF COURSE everyone giving me the digital Bronx cheer actually did read, or at least scan, the two articles. Yeah, if you believe that I have a good deal on selling you the Pelham Bridge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelham_Bridge

Here’s another thought about these mathematician naysayers who reside at the top of the science world pyramid. Perhaps the six of you just don’t psychology is even a science given that it does indeed mix art and science and proofs are rarely if ever readily testable. I mean, what gall to even call the Rorschach a test!

May I make a devil’s advocate? Proposition 1 is: American working class issues need to be addressed.

This is the mutual knowledge becoming common knowledge in recent half year. Media are by and large progressive left. People might be aware of the losing working class conservative Joe. But nobody want to say anything because that’s not cool to support conservative ideas. Trump is more like the little boy saying emperor has no clothes on.

The Democratic party, and the progressive left, have been lamenting the loss of the middle class at the hands of greedy capitalists for over 100 years. And for all of the programs they have instituted, starting with the income tax, a progressive one, in 1913, they haven’t change things one iota except to make the country more socialist and less industrial.

Exactly. If you would like to find an analogy of this election in the Emperor’s cloth story, Trump is the child. The emperor’s non-existing cloth is the propagada of the so-called “free media” and the controlling hands behind them.

We can take voting preferences as mutual knowledge and poll figures as common knowledge. Poll of trump was low 7 months ago. People who secretly supported Trump back then thought nobody else supports him. Now people have voted, they revealed their preference to the public. Now it’s common knowledge that Trump has lots of supporters.

The massage of the post that I identified with the most is the stance that “Trump is unfit to be president” and the call “But more people need to say so, openly.”

I also share the main point of the analysis: At present, there are many people, possibly a solid majority of the US population, who are deeply disturbed by Trump’s candidacy, by Trump’s behavior and by Trump’s positions, and regard him unfit, not even remotely. But many among them are uncertain because of not being aware of how wide spread the concerns regarding Mr. Trump are.

Of course, we cannot refer literally to “everybody” or “almost everybody”.
(And it is a good trait of democracy that nothing is accepted by “almost everybody”.) There are people who do identify with Mr. Trumps’ positions and who approve of his behavior. Some people may even think that “fits to be president” is not the right criterion to start with.

However, I do believe that there is a solid majority of Americans, quite possibly even a solid majority in every single state of the US who privately regard Mr. Trump as unfit and his actions and positions as largely violating the American values. For people, also those who are not typically involved in politics, to stand up and say so, could make a difference.

Trump routinely gets about 40 percent in nationwide polls. It’s probably not a solid majority that privately thinks the way you are conjecturing. And if you restrict to white voters, Trump does seem to get over 50 percent support as of now.

People here make their opinions of both candidates quite well-known. It may be hard for you to accept that the American voters are not as disturbed by Trump as you are hoping. But this is the reality. A lot of people will overlook Trump’s overt racism and dictatorial tendencies, or even not mind them, and choose him as an alternative to “the system”.

If there are any secret opinions not being expressed, it’s the people who vote for Trump but keep quiet about it. In public he is routinely trashed. In academic circles you could conceivably lose your job for expressing his kind of views. On the other hand, there’s absolutely no need to hold back if you are a Clinton supporter.

Michael, Perhaps, the point of the post is not so much about secret opinion not being expressed but about widely held private opinions not being expressed strong enough. You are probably right that there are also people who identify with Trump’s massage and keep quite about it. As always, but especially so because of the high stakes, it is probably instrumental to have as wide and as open discussion as possible. I hope that people who are deeply disturbed by Trump’s overt racism and dictatorial tendencies will say it, openly.

Michael, one more remark. You wrote: “It may be hard for you to accept that the American voters are not as disturbed by Trump as you are hoping…A lot of people will overlook Trump’s overt racism and dictatorial tendencies, or even not mind them, and choose him as an alternative to ‘the system’.” and

“If there are any secret opinions not being expressed, it’s the people who vote for Trump but keep quiet about it…On the other hand, there’s absolutely no need to hold back if you are a Clinton supporter.”

Indeed, I am hoping that the American voters will reject Donald Trump. Note that people who live in communities or families with support for Trump’s overt racism, dictatorial and anti-women positions, may also need to hold back or keep secret their views. This may especially apply to women.

The use of the word “knowledge” rather than “belief” in Terry’s post reveals a certain rigid moral arrogance, though. It seems to me that trump’s strategy is essentially a provocation. He may well turn out be a non ideologic, and possibly good president. Or at least, predicting the opposite from his current provocations sounds a bit too immediate and might just show that his campaign strategy is actually working.

It seems to me that Trump’s strategy is essentially a provocation. He may well turn out be a non ideologic, and possibly good president.

Sanford L. Segal’s Mathematicians under the ***** (2014) documents a mathematical community that similarly rationalized indecision and inaction, in effect by deluding themselves along parallel lines:

It seems to us that [the National Socialist platform] is essentially a provocation. [Their candidate] may well turn out be a non ideologic, and possibly good president.”

A crucial lesson of Segal’s history is “Speak up early, speak up plainly, and speak up loudly.” There’s no rational reason to study this history, if we don’t take lessons from it, is there?

Shall we criticize Terry Tao — and now Scott Aaronson and increasingly many other prominent STEM professionals — for speaking up earlier and more plainly and more loudly, than the too-shy too-quiet STEM professionals of the 1930s?

well, certainly not, but I don’t like the use of the term “knowledge”, which I find arrogant. I don’t think mathematicians are more politically qualified than politicians, and so this sounds a bit ridiculous to me. And trump may of course turn out to be a bad president. But a nazi or even something vaguely reminiscent seems almost impossible given the constitution. The worst he could do would be to fuel further trouble in the middle east. But I think bush may be unbeatable in this respect and, by the way, hillary doesn’t sound better…

I’m sure you’ll still defend Clinton’s fitness to be president after this book drops: http://goo.gl/hnAJYn

In terms of personality and temperament, Clinton may very well be worse than Trump. Her scandals are practically uncountable.

You claim this is irrelevant. And yet you admit that we will have no other practical choices than Trump or Clinton for president in November. In assessing which of our only 2 options is better, how is this not relevant information for consideration? Even if Trump is unfit, Clinton may be less fit. In that case, one ought to vote Trump.

Whether he may be “fit” (your undefined term, not usually employed or considered relevant in actual politics) or not, many will vote for him simply because they consider him the better of the two alternatives.

If you have ever been involved in politics, you know that one side usually considers the other guy unfit for anything but prison.

This piece is markably naive and pointless.

Trump exists as a viable political actor because the established power structure in both parties has ignored the wishes of the practical majority which put the current Congress in place.

So if we end up with an “unfit” president (not for the first time) it will be the people who “know” he is unfit who will have brought it about. Sort of ironic.

I believe that many people have the feeling that Trump is not so reliable at least in certain aspects, but they can’t be sure of it. Trump’s supporters must have a trade off between Trump’s good and bad points, or Trump will not be supported by so many people with such a long time.

If everybody knows that the sun rises from the east, such common knowledge will be formed at a short time. In the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the key reason for the situation that everyone is refusing to acknowledge the emperor’s nakedness kept for such a long time is that they have not the courage to tell the truth because of the possible punishment. It is not the case for Trump.

I am afraid not so. The constitution states no requirement for “fitness” of a president by any intellectual, physical or ideological standard. Hence, Donald Trump is as “fit” to be president as Hillary, since he is a natural born American over 35. As a progressive, who is trying to get the society to abolish discrimination of a person based on any natural traits, we have to swallow the bitter pill of Donald Trump, and realize this is a price to pay for equality for all. I have said it many times, democracy is not about right leading the wrong, the intelligent leading the stupid, democracy is simply, what the majority of the members of a society want. If Donald Trump is elected, he is fit for president by satisfying the criteria set by the constitution. If we don’t accept this, and impose an artificial “fit” criteria, then, may I ask, who is to define this “fitness”? The liberals, the conservatives, or the libertarian?

This thread is petering out. Considering that it is almost certain that following the A.P. announcing the result of their analysis is that Hillary has enough pledged and super-delegates (the later having been asked by A.P.) to win. Therefore, considering the interest Terry Tao’s commentariat has shown, I hope her writes another blog from his unique perspective. Certainly by tomorrow night when the Tuesday primary results are in we will know whether or not Bernie Sanders will withdraw.
Lots for Terry to write about.
I certainly intend to on my own blabbing blog (those few of us making comments who have websites have their names, as links, in purple here), and probably on Daily Kos where I frequently post what they call diaries.

That would be easy. Some names resemble other English words and when presented as such are quite funny. On the other hand, logically maneuvering from the way someone writes the letter “y” or “t” or the contour of their skull to a personality trait is an enigma.

Tao has made a fundamental blunder. He has mistaken opinion as fact. Mutual vs common knowledge as applies in epistemic logic is about facts (or ‘beliefs’ which are demonstratively provable as opposed to faith based beliefs) i.e. information to which everyone has (potential) access.
Facts inform us about the world. Opinions are reactions to an interpretation one has of the world.
Proposition 1 presented is an opinion not fact. Evidence in support of Prop 1 is merely a list of pros & cons to explain why or why not Prop 1 is the case. One may apply some math by attaching weights to the pros & cons and create some calculus to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions that would ‘prove’ or not Prop 1.

And, I am astonished even after Plato and Arrow’s Theorem, Tao believes, trusts, or favours still in any voting schema. Here in the United States, the Fourth Estate has implicitly imposed the winner-take-all because by limited focus upon just two, there exists the possibility of not breaking Arrow’s axioms.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote something quite interesting on his Facebook page regarding the underlying motives to vote for someone like Trump. Thought it might be interesting to read for some of you commenting here:

“What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call “rational” or “irrational” comes from misunderstanding of probability theory.”

I have been thinking about this. We have a number of things going on that are *clearly* sub-optimal. We have “civil forfeiture” which is anything but civil, we have the government apparently spying on the population, videos of police killing unarmed civilians, H1Bs process being abused, etc. etc. Political parties change, but the underlying problems aren’t fixed. I believe people want change in the worst way. (And that, unfortunately, is what they are voting for.)

I also think that Proposition 1 is true for most reasonable fitness metrics.

However i also feel that, since we don’t know the future, and since our models of how the world works are not perfect, we cannot totally discount the (very small but non-zero) possibility that Trump could turn out to be better (at least under some reasonable metric, and mostly due to unintended consequences).

Again, i think i am very very far from Trump positions (which -by the way- are themselves very unclear), but i though that some kind of discussion on what we mean by “fitness” could also be appropriate in this context.

It is probably worth remarking that in the Andersen’s tale “common silence” was rooted in the cognitive dissonance between “mutual knowledge” of the emperor’s nakedness and “common belief” in the lie perpetuated by swindlers-weavers, asserting that “their cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid”.

I feel immigration is the only issue holding Trump up. White Americans feel one of two $1.$ they are superior or $2.$ they are not responsible for what their ancestors did.

On the other hand why wouldn’t they not support trump? He promises a racial composition that made America great in 1945.

He promises fairness – why do not latino immigrants face the same rules as other immigrants and in what sense are they special? In fact the white or minority democrats do not like people like you and me who are in a sense well qualified to do skilled jobs. They only like latino immigrants essentially because they are low skilled and not a threat to them So they are also racist.

Please get down from your glass house and cast your stone. You need to stay away from John Oliver and other BS and talk to the people who know the issue.

It is a very interesting point about how people can look at the same thing and see something totally different. I have always regarded myself as solidly left of center, (and always will), but over the past couple of years I have really opened my eyes and realized that in the USA, virtually all of the racism, bigotry, hate speech, misrepresentations, bullying, narcissism, lack of empathy, abuses of power, violence, criminality, attacks on free speech, insanely nutty ideas, and cult-like activity come from the Democratic Party and The Left in general. I’m shocked to realize that The Left in reality, bears so little resemblance to what I always thought it should be it should be. It’s time for The Left to look inwards upon itself, and try to completely change into a force that can make the world a better place, instead of the horrifyingly negative force it is now. I believe I am one of millions of traditionally left of center voters who have opened their eyes and in this election will vote for Donald Trump and the Republicans, in the hope that the Democrats/Left, while out of power, will see that they absolutely have to purge their many toxic components. It really comes down to how many left-leaning people will permit themselves to see how it really is, and will speak out to permit others to see it too.

I think, this is not the real issue. Maybe a fair election in U.S. is just like an operator acting on an ensemble, probing how people model “success” in their social construct. Then, in this operator probe the Donald Trump term is so strong because the ideology he represents is so strong. It doesn’t matter if he is a liar, a cheat, there are simply too many people that want to be like him. He is the definition of success for many.

This is exactly the case how Berlusconi stayed in power in Italy for so long, everyone knew he was corrupt, everybody knew he was bad, and everybody complained, but at the same time, he was the idea of many Italians wanted to be, rich, powerful, surrounded by young girls.

Also, in my country, it is how the current president stays in his position, although he is commonly known to be corrupt, and it is common knowledge that he is ruining the country, the absolute hard-handed power he represents is apparently how my kindred want to be.

Thus, Donald Trump is not a cause. It is a consequence. And symptomatic cures rarely work. I think it is time USA should start thinking about how their society is organized, if Donald Trump is really a problem.

He is,
Because he is one of the signs of the collapse of the western culture. The demagog, as Plato wrote.

Proposition 2: Anyone who runs for president in the modern times is de facto not qualified.
Proof: Obama, Donald, Hillary.
Proposition 3: There is a solution to this problem.
Proof — I wish I could give a proof to this. Anyone have any ideas?

1. Is voting Trump (in the primaries) not rational, insofar as it achieves the voter’s goal of national attention focussing on a forgotten segment of the population? Having major media sitting up and taking more notice of these forgotten segments may be one big step to dissipating his momentum.

2. In game theory common knowledge usually applies to “the rules of the game”, but a lot of the (unofficial) rules in this election are being rewritten in real time — so even the rules are not common knowledge anymore. This is somehow reminiscent of the EU’s deficit problems, where the unwritten rules are the only ones that count. Some politicians do refer to the (official) written rules only when its politically convenient.

3. Tao’s proposition 1 is meaningless until you say where we put the bar for being qualified. The point is that it might be too high for any realistic candidate, so the issue loses its force. Just because we’re used to mediocre government doesn’t mean that staying the course is a safe bet in the future.

Technically, ‘qualified’ goes beyond what ken(neth) mentioned — there are formidable obstacles to getting on the ballot, state by state, so the legal criterion really depends on having sufficient public support – it’s a democratic criterion rather than a competency based criterion. Usually its sufficient as a safeguard.

Competent vs Qualified

While “competent “ is probably closer to T.-Tao’s meaning, there’s no point in dwelling on semantics.
So where do we put the bar for competency?
Not causing nuclear armageddon? or not causing huge irreversible damage? But what about not reversing a slow continuing slide into growing inequality, and hopelessness for a large segment of the population? It seems that something has gone missing in the usual system of checks and balances; lobbies are able to manipulate government quite easily. This may be related to the sheer increase in the scales of the organizations involved, especially with colossal scaling up due to globalization and in high finance. My point is that Clinton needs a serious plan to reverse this gradual deterioration, if the Trump ‘bomb’ is to be defused. This would probably involve drastic measures by most standards. The lack of determination to advocate anything too drastic is her weakness when faced with the likes of Trump.

To state the very very obvious:The Democratic Party is nonwhite identity politics on nonwhite identity politics steroids. The White Natives have noticed this, and they want for America the same type of race based-ethnic based National Origins Immigration Policy that Gil Kalai supports for his Israel. Imagine that, and Israelie Foreigner whose father was a high ranking member of Irgun lecturing Whitey about racism.

Terrence Tao

Perhaps you can tell us why you are so enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy towards Conservative Orthodox Christian Russia?

I hope you realize that the sharp way your formulated your opinion, combined with your influence within your department and your university, essentially silences and intimidates anyone (especially the tenure-track faculty) holding a possibly different view.

I just want to add that just recently Hillary Clinton viciously attacked Donald Trump for not showing a sufficient amount of over-the-top-violent hatred for Vladimir Putin.

During the 1990’s The Clinton Administration gang raped the Orthodox Christian Russian People with its neo-liberal economic policy. It is no big secret as to the ethnicity of these Clinton Administration Economists who forced this on the Russian People. And its no big secret as to the ethnicity of Russian Oligarchs who benefited from this mass gang rape of Russia.

How many Russians died from neoliberal shock therapy?..How many possible Russians were not born because of neoliberal shock therapy? Six million?…A Holocaust….don’t you think so Ben Golub?

At the San Jose Trump rally White Males were violently assaulted by the post-1965 Democratic Party Voting Bloc(Mexican Gang Bangers…ma-13 Salvadoran Male Yoots…and Blacklivesmatter activists(who are organized and given a Divine Edict by the Democratic Party Whitehouse)). I suppose this qualifies Hillary Clinton to be the next POTUS.

The violence against Trump Native White Male supporters in San Jose last week=Democratic Party Family Values!!!

It’s “normal” for this common knowledge vs mutual knowledge conundrum to arise because we are being FED by mass media in a ONE-WAY communication medium. The ability to converse and do feedback (the way humans were SUPPOSED to communicate) would have brought this cognitive dissonance to equilibrium LONG AGO

Candidate ‘fitness’ is relevant. For example it is defined differently for an ivy university professor in comparison to a not educated ‘professional’ pub bud drinker. There is no ‘mutual knowledge’, only ‘mutual ignorance’.

For the ‘academic person’ and the ‘establishment’ Trump seems “dangerous”. He is not. Trump sells homes, he is a salesman and he is good at it. Now he tries to sell himself as president. He will not change anything, he can’t change anything and he knows that.

Actually the only ‘mutual knowledge’ that exists is between aware people and Trump. They both know that Trump knows that he can’t do what he says he will do in order to sell himself as a future president.

There is something to your point. However, the issues that Trump talks about at his rallies are 1)issues that are popular with Native Born White American Voters…and 2)issues that are not going away if either Trump betrays his Native Born White American base and 2) the majority nonwhite Democratic Party Voting Bloc revolts against Trump.

To be brutally honest:The nonwhite Democratic Party Voting Bloc is delusional if it thinks that Native Born White American are not going to play the hard-core-racial-identity politics game that the Democratic Party Voting Bloc is playing. Native Born White Americans do not need the majority nonwhite Democratic Party Voting Bloc’s permission to this-which of course they won’t give.

In the context of the Blue Islander puzzle:Humans are a glorified ape species whose brains have been shaped by evolution. Racial Tribalism is hardwired into the Human Brain. At the end of the day, if human evolution is factored into the Blue Eye Islander Puzzle…The Blue Islanders don’t commit suicide..good old gut-level Boolean logic kicks in:you are member of our racial tribe…or you are not a member of our racial tribe.

White Liberals should have seriously considered this before they fanatically pushed the abstract proposition Nation nonsense-for nobody really every believed in this nonsense in the first place. The Han People of China certainly don’t believe in the abstract proposition Nation nonsense…Neither do the Israelis, even though Bibi Netanyahou demands that the Nations of Western Europe and Scandanavia open their borders to young male Muslim Yoots who are on a mass raping spree of Swedish ,German and English Women. We are talking about future European Mothers who will have been mass gang raped by a Muslim Male Yoot(Italian American slang from the movie “My Cousin Vinny”) invading army. This of course is Hillary Clinton’s immigration policy..which isn’t too much of a stretch for her considering that she is married to violent psychopathic serial rapist.

I suppose what I am attempting to say is that axiom S5 of epistemic modal logic doesn’t apply to real human brains that have a very long evolutionary history.

Axiom S5 of epistemic modal logic is just the Abstract Proposition Nation America nonsense in disguise…the ideology of Neoliberal Rape,Pillage an Plunder Economics much beloved by the Harvard trained Economic Advisors of Bill and Hillary Clinton….The ones that caused the genocidal collapse of the Russian population during the Clinton 1 administration. But they are very smart at math I am told.

I do have a significant criticism of Trump:he is taking advice from the War Criminal Henry Kissinger at the moment.

“Mutual knowledge,” he says. If people from both parties believe someone is unfit to be president, all the others should wise up!
I fail to notice anything that convinces me that Trump is not the right man for the job. The people that want the same thing for the country as me see Trump as positively as I do.
——————————————————————————————————
“I feel that it is time for the charade to end: Trump is unfit to be president, and everybody knows it. But more people need to say so, openly.”

His support extends to both parties, and his interpreted competence is similarly. The choice of the word “unfit” is split into three meanings for this.
1) His direction for the Country
2) His image for the Country (including physical if you wish)
3) His competence for the Country

If you cannot argue – and simply assume we all have the same motives – that Trump is objectionably a negative towards all suspected motivations for supporting him, you will get no objectionably negative.
——————————————————————————————————
“But more people need to say so, openly.”

And there is your reason for writing the article. You came to the justification that because you feel like there is no more proof necessary to claim he is an unfit presidential nominee, it should be apparent to everyone. There is nothing wrong with this, if there is no further evidence necessary to show the people that what he stands for why he is not capable.

——————————————————————————————————
If you would like to actually lessen Trump’s acceptance, argue why Trump is unfit to be the president of the Alt-Right, who is at least towards the direction of all of his truest supporters.

I know I let you in on the secrets about Trump in a prior video post but to your general point, mutual knowledge isn’t always true knowledge. Qualifications are elusive. For instance, higher education has no general empirical support just considering the history of invention. Here is are the facts:

“The Obama administration recently created a valuable online database called College Scorecard to offer a more realistic picture of income prospects with a college degree. One of the indicators in this database shows that more than half of graduates at hundreds of colleges are earning less than the average income of someone holding a high school degree ($25,000 a year) ten years after enrollment. Ideally, this ratio should be zero.”

It turns out that the causation is backwards:

“Cross national data show no association between the increases in human capital attributable to rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker. This implies the association of educational capital growth with conventional measures of TFP is large, strongly statistically significant, and negative. ” – Lant Pritchett (World Bank & Kennedy School of Government)

“[N]either the increase nor the initial level of higher education is found to have a statistically significant relationship with growth rates both in the OECD and worldwide. This result is robust to numerous different specifications.” – Craig Holmes (Oxford University)

I realize this is your blog and you can delete whatever you want, but for you to set the ground rules for what type of arguments can be made against your position is loading the dice against a fair debate.

There have been past Presidents who had very limited political experience who nevertheless turned out OK. Eisenhower apparently had never voted before he became President. Our current President had a brief and uneventful career as a Senator and before that he was a law professor. I don’t recall that you or many others argued that he was unqualified at the time.

Trump was a very successful businessman who has conducted business all over the world (and not just the Miss Universe pageant). In a world where politicians rarely say what they really have on their mind (in other words, they lie most of the time) he is a refreshing breath of fresh air, which is why he has appealed to millions of voters.

He may not be your cup of tea, but Constitutionally, he is a natural born American citizen over the age of 35, so therefore he IS qualified. There are no official qualifications for President other than those.

Like so many commenters here, you are equivocating on the meaning of the word “qualified” and thus you have actually failed even to address Terry Tao’s proposition. Tao never denies that Trump is legally qualified. But Trump is not at all qualified to effectively perform the duties of the President without harming our standing in the world, our military power, our economy, our race relations, and our Constitution.

That’s true, and it was my initial reaction to Professor Tao’s comments. But his comments do touch upon something very deep and very relevant….COMMON KNOWLEGE. Quite possibly Professor Tao’s comments were a gut-level unconscious-semiconscious reflex to what is obviously a historically very significant US election.

The Common Knowledge that professor Tao writes about in his post in a quasi-analytic way is in reality the Democratic Party Voting Bloc-Mega-CEO agreement about what is permissible public thought and speech for The Historic Native Born White American Majority. This is just another way of saying that The Historic Native Born White American Majority has been giving a divine edict to keep quite and accept the post-1965 political consensus passively…which is:full-speed ahead with the open and deliberate policy of radically transforming the racial transformation of America by importing highly racialized nonwhite legal immigrants who are the hardcore majority of the Democratic Party Voting Bloc, who would never never tolerate the exact same race-replacement legal immigration policy for China,India,Israel,Mexico, the Dominican Republic..and South Korea. And they do it in a very Boolean logic kind of way:our racial kind your in…not our racial kind you don’t get in. Its very binary. Hey what the heck, isn’t all modal logic ultimately reducible to idempotency anyway?

The Democratic Party Voting Bloc sees Trump as a very serious threat because Trump…whether it is his intent or not….is activating long dormant-hibernating Native Born White American Racial Identity Politics.

Seems like a misunderstanding, it is a proposition given the $form$ a mathematical statement (one which is in analogy called as well proposition), which appears when looking at the readership appropiate (anyway its just the form). Another question is the content, one might agree or disagree with that. discussing this, rather then discrediting it is at the very heart of democraty.

Shockingly, among the reasons Scott Aaronson will be voting for Hillary Clinton is that Donald Trump lacks the intestinal fortitude to threaten Conservative Orthodox Christian Vladimir Putin and the Conservative Orthodox Christian Russian People with thermonuclear extermination.

I always thought that spreading the Gospel of the Entangled Quibit Realm would usher in the era of Really Groovy Hippie Yippie …I’ll be gender neutral about this…Universal Human Luv!!!!!!!!!….You know like eating brown rice was suppose to do in the 1960’s.

As your post is clearly intended to persuade people against voting for Trump, and in favor of some other candidate or not at all, ““tu quoque” is not relevant here. In my opinion, both of the main candidates are unfit, but Hillary is more unfit than Trump. You would no doubt disagree, but that is because we have different preferences and hence judge the candidates along different axes. Rather than Trump’s unfitness, you are seeking to establish Hillary’s greater fitness as common knowledge. But that is not even mutual knowledge, let alone common.

I think I agree with you. The US is with very high probability ungovernable.

I am not an expert on this stuff…but I wonder if the Blue Eyed Islander Puzzle has something to with economic social welfare theorems.

The Blue Eyed Islander Puzzle possibly-might have something to do with the concept of the social contract in a society where the consent to governed is withdrawn by 1)all demographic groups…or 2)one large demographic group.

Dear Mr Tao,
All the world (only me) understands you.You are very careful in problem such politics .Once you post, you are sure you are right and win 100%.That is a core all the word not uunderstand you.You are more than others great scientists that you are not very smart ,but also very sensitive with the sixth sense,I know that you are not genius in math,but also in politics,astronomy(you are very good at universe),physics,with the sixth and seventh sense you solve all Clay millennium problem,beside if someone claims he solves the best problem,you immediately know he is wrong or right,you are never pioneer,you always go behind(you are humble,you are waiting aan opportunity ,you turn back 360% with the opponent,this makes him fail down from high mountain with wrong proofs

Here we get a glimpse into Donald Trump’s rhetorical strategy (one of them).

Bullshit is a statement whose truth cannot be checked — call it “immeasurable” or “borderline”.

Someone on his team, found a statement about Senator Warren — which may be false… let’s all this truth value “Maybe False”. Trump, then uses such Maybe False statements in order to give a “Maybe” Proof that he would make a good President.

Donald Trump was stating the very obvious…in the Kolmogorov 0-1 law sense…that Elizabeth Warren is a fake…as in a fake Poccohantus with probability 1 of this being true.

The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezzos who created a torture chamber wage slave work environment for Amazon Workers. Jeff Bezzos sees himself as a demi-god billionaire with life and death power…as does greedy parasite Mark Zuckerberg….over millions of Native Born White American Workers. It is psychopathy write large!!!!!-that’s for sure.

Elizabeth Warren is basically acting as a corporate lawyer working on behalf of the White Liberal Greedy Cheating Class Mega-CEO. We are all in the REALM OF THE MEGA-CEO PSYCHOPATH….

The post-WW2 Social Contract has been flushed down the toilet bowl by the likes of Jeff Bezzos…Mark Zuckerberg…Steve Balmer….Bill Gates….every Silicon Valley demi-god billionaire.

[…] brought enough concern that Terence Tao, one of the greatest living mathematicians, has devoted a blog post solely to make the point that it is about time that people publicly stand up against Trump. […]

from 1989 by Isaac Asimov. This got me to wishing Terry would write another piece about Trump and his followers using this as a jumping off point.

The Relativity of Wrong

Asimov begins:

I RECEIVED a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on.)

It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight.

I didn’t go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930. What’s more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930.

[[[[ I’d skim through the middle part where he explains why the arguments that the earth is flat and that the earth is a perfect sphere have been proven wrong. We all know that. Instead read the first nine paragraphs ending with “let’s take an example.”]]]

Then consider the last four paragraphs:

Since the refinements in theory grow smaller and smaller, even quite ancient theories must have been sufficiently right to allow advances to be made; advances that were not wiped out by subsequent refinements.

The Greeks introduced the notion of latitude and longitude, for instance, and made reasonable maps of the Mediterranean basin even without taking sphericity into account, and we still use latitude and longitude today.

The Sumerians were probably the first to establish the principle that planetary movements in the sky exhibit regularity and can be predicted, and they proceeded to work out ways of doing so even though they assumed the earth to be the center of the universe. Their measurements have been enormously refined but the principle remains.

Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.

I know that you are probably shy of media and don’t want to get into trouble there. But given what is at stake, I recommend considering the following.

The media seems to have had no trouble in the past identifying you as the greatest or one of the greatest living mathematicians. If you were to, say, contact the campaign of a major presidential contestant in order to have arranged to publicly (that is, rallies, interviews, …) throw your weight behind that candidate, you would perhaps not only be able to promote the cause of that candidate, but also to form a relationship to that candidate that may allow for a healthy influence on important issues like climate change, the economy and so on, where your mind surely more than dwarfs the political think tanks informing US politicians (even, which I doubt, if not in terms intelligence, then certainly in terms of neutrality), not to mention a public stage given to you to advocate for certain issues. Consider your possibilities, I’m pretty sure you can do it faster than I do (I work hard with good methods, but unfortunately, there are physical speed limits to my brain, at least given a method!). (Fritz Zwicky had a nice method called the ‘morphological approach’, look for the 1969 book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Zwicky#Publications)

I presume that most Americans feel that Hilary Clinton is “more of the same”, i.e. her presidency would largely be similar to that of Obama or her husband’s. Similarly, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and many others, would have acted similarly to GHWB and GWB as presidents.

One must understand that there is a large group of Americans who’ve been extremely disappointed with *all* the presidents of the last 20-30 years. They are not interested in “more of the same”, whether it is the Democrat “same” or the Republican “same”. Both “same”s have failed them miserably time and again, at least from a socioeconomic perspective.

What are Trump’s qualifications? He isn’t more of the same. And for plently of people, that’s enough. Here’s a snippet from a January 2016 survey by RAND:

0: There are no perfect person, but a leader need to be correct on big major issues.

1: Real world problems about people are always complex but not complicated. The complex part is that not all information are provided like Math problems and there’re fake information.

2: If you don’t have enough good information, you can’t possibly know what are big issues and what kind of solution is practical.

3. You know little about the following topics(i.e. you don’t have enough information):
+ Islam
+ Terror attacks
+ ISIS, how it is born, how it is related with US foreign policy
+ History of conflicts and killings caused by radical religion in big countries (like China, European countries)

4. As a result of 0-3, your proposition have little meaning.

PS:
+ If you just google a topic and hit the first link, you’re very likely to be manipulated (you have to experience and know enough to identify false information).
+ I think it is totally reasonable if you don’t want to waste your SUPER brain power on such things.

I believe there is an axiom that your proposition is using, and I believe that axiom does not hold in our current state of democracy:
Axiom 1.
The candidate who gets more votes is the most qualified to be President of the USA.

Now, the following proposition IS true, at least in the Republican primaries:
Proposition 1.bis
Donald Trump is the candidate able to gather the most votes.

I believe that, similar to the systems of quantifying intelligence (exams and scores), the rules of Democracy were created with the intent of “if you are fit for being President, you will get more votes”. But that was because the objective function at the time was “be a good President for your people”. That objective function has changed, inevitably, to “get the most votes”. (I say it’s similar to exams and grades because the rules have changed from “learn as much as you can and you will get good grades” to “do what you can to get good grades”). It is human nature, in my opinion, and in any case, Trump’s nomination as the Republican Candidate makes the negation of Axiom 1. common knowledge.

I don’t think mathematicians should get involved in politics, much less US politics (excepting regrettably perhaps now, the matter of the NSA, which we will soon be unable to avoid)

I read enough history about Americans not to be all that concerned about a Trump presidency, and as far as I can see he is simply the US electorates blowout after being squeezed dry by neo-liberalism. I say let them have their blowout now, or risk them picking someone even worse later.

In any case, I don’t think mathematicians should involve themselves at all in these matters. It only undermines the authority of the profession in its own field. Maths should be above politics and trying to construct propositions about boorish property tycoons in a country which elected Ronald Regan and Roosevelt I is just dragging ourselves down into the mud to wrestle with the pig — and the pig likes it!

Save your ammo for the coming NSA fallout. If there’s any proposition to be made, it’s that the fallout from that scandal on the mathematical community is truly inevitable.

I doubt Terry is even following these posts… but if he is I am sure he is ignoring those who say that by dint of his having study mathematics he shouldn’t apply a logical paradigm to understanding why so many people are in thrall to the small digit legerdemain of wannabe president Donald Trump.
“Watch my stubby fingers, back and forth, back and forth, I am wearing the finest best clothes of anyone ever, and if you don’t see it you’re just plain stupid…. “

Trump is qualified by being democratically nominated. Your post goes against the principle of universal suffrage.

Neither you, nor Hillary, are above the people who voted for Trump. Neither you, nor Hillary, are qualified to judge who is “fit” to be a president, or what “ought to be common knowledge”. That is how modern democracy works.

I saw this post mentioned in a sidebar while browsing moyhu’s blog but I misread the title. I thought that it said “It ought to be common knowledge that Donald Trump is not fit for the *Predator* of the United States of America”, and I had to disagree … until I read it again. ;o)

Please try to spend time and understand the dynamics of the country. What the democrats are seeking is immoral. In 2012 they tried to pass an unfair reform. The illegals just need to pay taxes for 10 years and they become citizens (and 15 million of them are just from one country) while the legals still need to find a sponsor and slave work and convince their employers to sponsor them (it will still take 15 years to get legally 15 million of them and 100 years to from a single contry). I do not like the right wingers either but center right or center left is much more better than far left and far right.

Though I would prefer a democrat to come I strongly believe democrats are literally changing the racial dynamics of the country. Both parties are racists but decide yourselves who is most dangerous in the long run and I hope you will take this as input and post a wiser post again.

Your post and scott aaronson’s post do not address immigration dynamics which is the primary reason Trump has a chance.

Supreme court blocked the executive order. The EO did nothing to legals who spend a fortune to get educated and follow rules and cannot get any permit for a job without company sponsoring them for several 1000 dollars. The illegals get the goodies for free with no catch attached. If they get laid off they can drink and smoke for several months and find another job at next walmart. This is what the EO literally does. It is almost as good as a Green card which takes a life time of suffering for a legal to get.

Please decide who is the real demagogue and placates to the mind of the people and for where the country should be.

It is clear if the conservative judge had not passed away the executive order would have been in peril. It is ‘time’ which is what is saving the status quo.

I do not like Donald Trump and I would agree pretty much everything the democrats say but it will only be the 4 or 5 states which will pretty much decide the election and there is a 50+% chance these will go to Trump.

Being a legal immigrant I am afraid of Trump but the alternative is immoral. Please get down from your glass house.

If the illegals from one country are not swamping the system here there will be a provision for many other poor countries to benefit since like Australia or other developed countries there could be a technically legal way for poor people from other countries to benefit.

In the “emperor’s new clothes” story there is no failure of common knowledge because everyone observes the same information (assuming that they all see the emperor and each other). Technically, for any finite and sequence of people who can see each other and the emperor, A knows that B knows that C knows that … Z knows the emperor is unclothed, which is the definition of common knowledge. The equivalent of a public announcement is in the words “they all see the emperor and each other”.

The reason that the conclusion takes so long to reach in both the Emperor’s Clothes story and the Blue-Eyed Islander puzzle, is that there is a severe disincentive for anyone to say publicly what he can observe.

In Trump’s case there has never been any disincentive to criticizing him, and it seems that the opposite is true; there is (unless he gets elected) a significant cost to public figures who openly endorse Trump.

So the arguments about common knowledge are beside the point here.
This blog post is actually arguing the more conventional and non-mathematical point that this is a time for anti-Trump opinion to coalesce by making the anti-Trump arguments more forcefully.

Finally, the survey that Jacques Distler linked gives evidence that Trump’s supporter is robust and issue-driven, and if that is what it comes from, it is not likely to be affected much by a strategy of preaching more vocally to the choir. Instead one would have to point out something horribly wrong with Trump (compared to, for example, president Reagan or governor Schwarzenegger) or amazingly good about Clinton or Sanders so as to reduce his level of support.

As I start reading my usual political websites and have an ear tuned to the news on MSNBC I don’t know what, if anything, I’m going to write later this morning. One thing caught my attention on Politico, Hillary Clinton’s path to victory, so of course I click on that cautioning my self before I do not to get too overconfident. Trump has only one path to victory:

… ginning up disaffected, non-college educated, working-class white voters — many whom may never have voted before — to sweep across the Rust Belt, in places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio.
I’m not particularly proud of my reaction to this because it seems elitist, snobbish, and in current parlance certainly not politically correct. If it was merely disaffected voters he needed to win, you could say the same thing about Bernie Sanders. Much of his support has been among disaffected voters, the younger of those who may have never voted. However many if not most of them are either in college or college graduates. No matter that they may make the same or even less than those considered working class, when you consider other commonalities rather than economic class they are among those who might – non-PC alert – be called the critical thinking class.

If income is taken out of the equation, can we call the majority of Trump supporters poorly educated and working at blue collar jobs. Those that I’ve seen interviewed who were in college seemed to be, dare I say, gullible. The term that came to mind for may Trump supporters was “white trash.” I decided to talk a little walk on the Google side and found looking up”white trash” that there was so much written on a subject I’d have to spent several days wading though the relevant material of write a front page worth Daily Kos essay.

I thought I’d skim though some of the articles just to get a general idea what academic experts had to say.

In 2013 sociologist Matt Wray published “White Trash: The Social Origins of a Stigmatize”. He writes about the “deep historical entanglements with the politics of sex, race, and class.” But he reminds us that awhile back the term white trash was synonymous with poor white trash, often synonymous with “trailer park trash.”

I think the crowds that came out to hear Sarah Palin speak showed us that you didn’t have to be poor or live in a trailer park to be susceptible to demagoguery.

In 2014 an Urban Dictionary contributor named Mike offered up a pretty good definition of the kind of white trash whose mindset Trump is tapping into: Urban Dictionary:

A term used broadly and often inaccurately to define a person or group of persons whom embody the concepts of ignorance, racism, violence, alcoholism, and anglo-saxon ancestry. It is often used as a label on the poor caucasian working class. Many people are labelled “white trash” because of the clothes they wear and their appearance, regardless of wealth and standing. Many that use this term do not understand the lifestyles of those whom they deride and oftentimes neglect to see that many people in the poor white working class are actually very intelligent tolerant people who tend to like professional wrestling, cheap beer and NASCAR. Many others were born with mental or physical disabilities and are forced into the stereotypical “white trash” lifestyle by the opressive society of the united states which tends to ignore its lowest classes. If correctly applied, the term refers to people such as the military personnel who had a wonderful time playing fraternity pranks on the prisoners of Abu Ghraib prison, the corporate scum who build their big box department stores right across the road from mom and pop stores which are then forced out of business for the greater good of a couple of obscenely rich assholes at the top, idiots who write “dotheads are dirty” on the walls of gas station restrooms that are not even run by east Indians but people of middle-eastern descent yet they are too full of themselves to notice a difference, and especially Texan wannabe cowboys who carelessly overrun foreign countries without noticing the thousands of innocent lives that are constantly being ended and then having the nerve to say “GOD IS ON OUR SIDE!
As I embarked on my second cup of coffee and reread this definition it hit me that these are the sort of people who are fans of Howard Stern. I expect Stern would proudly say he appeals to white trash. This being said, I think it is telling that Donald Trump has been on the Howard Stern show some two dozen times (according to Huffington Post) where he once said “Do you like girls that are five-foot-one? They call it — they come up to you-know-where.”

In 2013, The New York Post, not known for scholarly articles, had a good opinion piece “When did white trash become normal?”

When Snooki, whose talents include getting sloppy drunk and throwing up on camera, made Barbara Walters’ “Ten Most Fascinating People” list a few years back, one could only ask: Was Octomom not available?

Last year, “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” which features a cornucopia of social ills, was TLC’s highest-rated show, attracting more cable viewers than the Republican National Convention, which had the misfortune to share the time slot with the charmers from Georgia. The show’s matriarch, June Shannon, has four daughters by four men, one of whose names she can’t recall.

White Trash is the new normal — and you don’t have to tune in to reality TV to rub elbows with pathologies that once stayed put in Skunk Hollow. White Trash Normal has invaded every nook and cranny of life, from table manners, to dress, to money management.

As unnerving as it is to say, Donald Trump appeals to “the new normal.” Scary.

[…] difference between mutual knowledge and common knowledge, in a blog post with the normative title It ought to be common knowledge that Donald Trump is not fit for the presidency of the United States…. It’s common knowledge that Terry Tao, in addition to being one of the Mozarts of […]

I have another good example.
This quote comes from the Washington Post.
‘Despite his hopes for an economic relationship with Libya, Trump apparently felt no qualms about a military strike on Gaddafi. In 2011, he was recorded saying that the West should “knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives,” ‘
also from the same item (background info),
‘Gaddafi renounced his support for terrorist groups and publicly gave up his quest for nuclear weapons.’
The US was unable to get a nuclear deal with Iran as a result. No one will give up their nuclear weapons programs as requested by US after seeing how the US betrayed Gaddafi. He was physically ripped apart in the streets by US supported rebels.

So, is IRV in Australia helping them to succeed at having a diverse political system not controlled by two parties?

I think you need to seriously reconsider IRV. It has serious pathologies that can lead it to further entrenching 2-party systems and this squandering our chance at effective electoral reform.

The only system that makes sense (being far simpler than the screwiness of IRV, lacking the serious pathologies, and for electing consensus candidates) is score voting (or its simpler cousin, approval voting). See electology.org for details, and consider the real-world insanity of IRV such as this atrocious result in Burlington, VT: http://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html

Plenty of people in the UK (a sizable minority, at least) were, and still are, completely and thoroughly convinced (with their own reasons) that leaving the EU was the best option, so I’m not convinced the discussion of Brexit has much at all to do with the notion of “common knowledge”, which would presuppose that everybody (or almost everybody) “knew” (or believed) otherwise.

You think Donald Trump is not qualified/ Well sorry, I do not think that most republican Representatives are qualified to represent the people or be president. Trump is a real estate person and knows how to deal with difficult circumstances. Just read his books. It all depends on who he will be listening to, who will advice him, on how successful he would be as president.
Look at the Bush people with Cheney etc. Look at the Clinton friends.
Sorry I like his brash talk and his way of upsetting the establishment.
You never judge a candidate from what he says while running for office.
Study his past, read the books, then make up your mind on who to vote for.
Regards
Konrad Benz

Donald Trump is an extremely capable businessman, negotiator, parent, and golfer. He is now learning how to deal with a highly corrupt political system that has failed to put the interests of average Americans before self interest and global glamour in a rapidly changing world. Many people like him….go figure.

Maybe America needs a Donald Trump so there will never be more Donald Trump supporters in the future!! that seems paradoxical, but hear me out.
The problem is not Donald Trump, the problem is the people that think Donald Trump could be a valid POTUS. Maybe, once and for all, america needs a Donald Trump so we’ll never have to deal with any more trump lookalikes in any presidential run….presidents come and go, America is more than its presidents; and what is the worst that could reallistically happen to America if Donald Trump is president for 4 years?
I can name you a very good thing, no more Donald Trumps for 100 years…..
It is like the Brexit, in 20 years all the guys who voted for Brexit are going to beg the rest of Europe to come back….sometimes you need to go to the wrong direction to remind you what was the right direction and to get rid of all the base support of the candidate who was misleading you….

If a scientist discovered some ground truth (such as a certain element or elementary particle), s/he is praised and rewarded, no matter what s/he background was (where s/he got his degree or his/her affiliation etc.)

Trump discovered an important ground truth that the political elites from both parties have failed to see (or did not bother to respond to):

Fact 1. Many disadvantaged Americans suffered greatly or at least have not been benefiting as much as the upper classes.

If the language used above sounds biased, how about this:

Fact 1′. Many Americans supported Trump and believed that he would serve them better than any political insider.

Are we, scientists, giving Trump enough credit for his discovery? Or are we professors as disconnected with common Americans as the ruling families? If we are so shocked by Trump’s success, aren’t we missing some knowledge common to his supporters? Who is the child and who is the emperor?

Have we ever accepted/rejected/scrutinized a paper influenced by the authors’ affiliation/reputation? What exactly are the reasons for us to love one candidate so much yet hate the other equally intensely?

I’m afraid that the many reasons articulated for supporting Hilary can be used to support the following proposition.

Proposition: Princes/Princelings are in general better equipped to govern a country.

So, even if you vote for Clinton, Trump deserves your praise for making many Americans heard. In fact, if you are an American, Trump is a reason for you to be a proud American. His rise is a testimony of American democracy — that people still have voice. Hopefully the winner of this race, he or she, could learn from the loser how to do his/her job better.

Terry, why don’t you instead put your mind to performing an ideological Turing test: argue for the pro-Trump position in a way convincing to a real trump support. Steel-man your arguments. Deal with a broad swathe of important issues–like abortion and immigration. Generate the best arguments possible–even if their not ones currently made by Trump.

I think you’ll find this a far more profitable exercise for understanding Trumpism or even persuasively arguing against it.

I do not find Proposition 1 to be a correct assertion. I believe it is missing a very important continuation and that is a compared to statement. This statement is crucial as the elections are between two individuals and not an inidividual against an abstract notion of what is or is not a president figure. I also believe that the importance of “compared to what” is voting system agnostic as again we compare individuals between one and another. Sure these individuals might be compared to approach one’s abstract thought of a president but that is more an expedience in the sense that you measure them against each other in comparison to the ideea of an ideal president, so it alwais comes down to the comparison between candidate A and candidate B. So I am making the assertion that for all pragmatic purposes even if every candidate in an ellection is not qualified, when measured agains the minimum requrements for the position, they can be the most qualified when compared to others for the individual voter. To be more concrete people can assert that donald trump is a good candidate for presidency when compared to Hillary and it would be a valid proposition. Now, i am not an american but from what i can tell, i would find it very difficult to say that one is better than the other but this, i believe, does not contradict my previous statement regarding Proposition 1

Fitness varies significantly throughout time,
and can only ever be proven in hindsight,
but never in foresight of a hypothetical future.

I think that Fitness currently is mostly name recognition.

Perot 3rd w/ 18% in 1992, and Roosevelt 2nd w/ 27% 1912.
The people who are most likely to split the vote in 2016 are
Trump, Clinton, Palin, Sanders, Gingrich and Warren, in that order.
No one else has anywhere near the necessary name recognition.
But they can be promised vp or other cabinet positions for support.

It could be that things are as close to the mathematical optimum
in the US as it is possible to be, regardless of the candidate.

If could be that all that is left is to get those that don’t know it,
ie. those who are unfit, to truly believe it in their hearts, then
they would be truly happy.

The emperor having no clothes only matters when having clothes matter.

A pill being a placebo only matters when “ignorance is bliss” does not apply.

This currently is not in the mathematics domain, but if it is, one needs
to show that either fitness matters in the case of a near mathematical
optimum, or that currently it is not close enough to a mathematical
optimum yet.

Back to 1992, both party was about 40% satisfied with the candidates,
and the party that was more satisfied, the Republicans, lost. In 2016,
both parties are about 40% satisfied with the candidates, but this time
the party that is more satisfied is the Democrats. However, Republicans
are more polar than ever, made polar by fake promises, made fake by
even the most “FIT” Republicans have failed to fulfill and have now
chosen to basically shut the congress down in many ways that matter
the most to such voters, showing they have done all they can, it is time
for someone else to try, if they dare.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called Trump a “faker.”

So I THINK this means that:

Clinton will name Sanders as VP choice.

and

Trump will name Palin as VP choice.

While Palin was not the best choice in 2008, it is a different time now,
and she has had time to prepare. The surprise of such a pick, which
should not be a surprise at all in HINDSIGHT, shows just how out of touch
“FIT” Republicans are.

Furthermore, if the Republicans revolt at their Convention, that would give
TRUMP/PALIN more votes as INDEPENDENTS. and the new dichotomy (or tracheotomy) would be D/I (or D/R/I). Which is why Trump and Palin are
keeping it a surprise.

Palin is the only person as VP for Trump that Proves he is not a “faker.”
Both truly don’t care what others think, will do things their way, and will
not be pushed around or changed by BIG MONEY/LOBBYS/ETC.

But my point of view has no more or less worth than other points of view,
although is has much less numbers than the two polar mainstreams.

Question is if plausible (=? obvious) is equivalent to valid. Look at ants, each one is like a machine running on a very simple program lets say. You cannot predict “plausibly” (easily) what the effect of such a simple program will be in the complex environment of the anthill (the will build roads tunnels, search for paths, kill ill ones, …). Trump apparently is running on a very (lets call it) “simple” program, but who knows what will be the effects of that in politics (of course this view of politics is far away from common sense and mutual knowledge, but who knows).

Just to make it clear, my personal opinion on Trump is a very low one, and I feel that he is not more appropriate for being president then a huge majority of the population. Though as a scientists we should, as you do, bring more interesting/deeper arguments into the discussion, if we choose so. Most of us when it comes to taking the weight of our names in, will rarely choose to do so. In this case the sheer significance of the outcome justifies in my eyes this choice.

The only way to prove of disprove Dr. Tao conjecture that Trump is unfit is to vote for Trump to get him elected as president so Trump can prove or disprove it himself.

Dr. Tao is the best mathematician currently working. He just about only blogs about math stuff. So when he blogs about politics with a conjecture, it is important enough to be sure to empirically test. The only way to do that is to vote for trump so he wins and the conjecture is tested.

Well, Dr. Tao, you may have changed a vote for Clinton to a vote for Trump.

Unless, of course, both Clinton&Sanders decline & endorse Biden/Warren.
Otherwise, a small percentage of Sanders voters will vote trump because of the DNC emails.

After the DNC emails, Clinton’s email server, and Obama’s Snowden (Snowden leaked during Obama’s term and Obama just acted like it was no big deal, textbook unfitness, I just don’t get it), it is clear to me that, to the Democrats, it is common knowledge that knowing and following the rules, especially ones about sensitive information, is not important.

The republicans hated Trump out of fear he was unfit, yet those on the RNC had the courage and integrity to be fair to Trump because it is in the rules and being fair to all candidates according to the rules is also fair and respectful of the voter. In the end, the republicans decided to change and unite behind Trump respecting the voters and Democracy. (The most disagreeing republicans at most tried and failed to change the rules).

The democrats thought Sanders was fit enough, though some thought Clinton was more fit, which is fine, but what is not fine is the DNC to work against Sanders according to the news reports about the DNC’s own emails, whether fit or unfit, they chose to ignore or break or disregard their own rules about impartiality, the foundation of the purpose of the DNC, ignoring, disrespecting, and insulting the voter and the democratic process.

However, the response of the DNC, rewarding the leader by excusing him/her form his/her speaking duty, saying it is sufficient to satisfy Sanders, shows how little the DNC thinks of the voter and the democratic process.

To be fair, the only way to prove or disprove a anybody is unfit to be president is themselves during the time they are president, and the voter has the last word in that matter.

All front runners has expressed hope for improvement of society.
And certainly there are significantly worse choices for president that Trump:
Palin, or even worse myself, or even worse. The perpetual pessimist P Atkinson: www ourcivilisation com.

Donald Trump is the smartest person in US politics. He single-handedly overthrew an entire political party all while fending off the rabid hounds of the corporate media. Anyone that thinks Trump is “not fit” for the presidency is totally disconnected from reality and probably does math all day

To Trump supporters, ideology is more important than competence. See The Guardian, August 7, 2016, “American Nazi Party leader sees ‘a real opportunity’ with a Trump presidency.” Quoting from the article: “The leader of the American Nazi Party has said the election of Donald Trump as president would present ‘a real opportunity for people like white nationalists’ to start ‘acting intelligently’, with the aim of building a mainstream political presence similar to that of the Congressional Black Caucus…. The American Nazi Party is a fringe group that grew out of that founded by George Lincoln Rockwell in 1959. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who is running for the US Senate in Louisiana and has spoken favourably of Trump, was once a follower. This week, Duke told NPR: ‘As a United States senator, nobody will be more supportive of his legislative agenda, his supreme court agenda, than I will.'”

I fully agree and support Dr. Tao opinion; Donald Trump is NOT fit to lead America and quite honestly isn’t a very good businessman either. If you know any history about Trump, you’ll see that he has actually use bankruptcy as a business solution and that he is inconsistent; and quite frankly, I don’t want someone with those characteristics to be the President of my country. I believe that Hillary Clinton with her experience and knowledge in politics, would be the best option we have.

Thanks for your article. It was quite interesting. I believe we are all getting a good lesson in a high-functioning sociopath, and have done a lot of research on the topic. The emperor fable is often used to portray how sociopaths function as leaders, and that may be the link between our articles. I invite you to read my article, and feel free to re-post it if you wish. Again, thanks for provoking thought and discussion. B. Ashley https://twoifbycharmwordpress.wordpress.com/

You are using the logic of urban academics/professionals and not many of the people likely to support Trump. To many voters outside the professional class, they want someone who they feel like is similar to them. That is what Donald Trump provides. It is no coincidence that Jerry Falwell Jr called Trump a “blue collar billionaire.” He is tapping into an anger that is still largely prevalent among blue collar Americans about economic and social changes in the country.

If you want to see the logic in action, drive to Bakersfield, Fresno, or another city in the Central Valley and talk about politics. If you drive from LA to SF right now, you will see Trump signs along the way on I-5. Stop by a diner in one of the towns hit hard by the drought and see how far your logic goes. Even though Trump can’t affect it, the people are so hard hit by the water restrictions that his rhetoric is what they want to hear.

Vox has done extensive reporting about the mechanisms behind Trump’s rise. It is actually quite easy to see and quite easy to study. It just occurs in places that are outside the stomping grounds of many academics, professionals, and journalists. It also involves different logic than that group is accustomed to.

There exists no such thing as “qualified” in politics. Politics is just whatever anyone wants the laws to be. That’s it. No matter how fair or unfair they seem to you. Everything outside formal mathematics is bullshit.
There is no objective proof or truth outside formal math & testable quantifiable falsifiable objective physical science.
There exists no such things as “fact” in politics or law.
They are ALL just political opinions.

I am more anti-Trump & anti-Clinton than anyone.
But, I NEVER delude myself into believing this nonsense of conflating “what is/was/will be” with “what should be”.

We SHOULD have laws outlawing factory farming & breeding nonhuman animals for meat, and mandating veganism until bioengineers perfect biocultured meat without breeding animals.
Forcing new nonhuman animals into existence, especially for needless torture & murder, violates THEIR animal rights.
We SHOULD have laws outlawing breeding humans: people have kids,
or allow antinatalist citizens to physically stop breeders from breeding, forcing new humans into existence.without their permission
We SHOULD have laws allowing civilians to blow up prisons to free all prisoners. All prisoners are prisoners of war.
ALL law is violent force. It is MEANINGLESS to condemn “violence” and “violent force” in general, legal or illegal, unless you add up the POSITIVES for which it is used: i.e. the REASONS. It is UNREASONABLE, i.e. anti-reason NOT to include an individual’s REASONS for fighting/killing/imprisoning/arresting another.

We SHOULD go to war against Wall Street & banking & financial terrorists.

We SHOULD go to war against Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)
& fossil fuel addiction.

And there is NO excuse to deny prisoners the right to vote.
Because I sure as hell would love to deny anti-secular anti-atheist
breeding pronatalist meat-eaters the right to vote.

I just toss those meaningless words “terrorist” & “criminal” around,
because all these dumb anti-math people seem to like using them & taking them seriously. But, to me, I don’t care whether somebody “is” a terrorist or “is” a criminal or “is” a racist or “is” a muslim or “is” a child molestor or “is” a legal citizen or “is” an atheist, etc etc I care about what they DO or WOULD do or think SHOULD be done, and their REASONS for doing so, about the POSITIVES outweighing the NEGATIVES FOR THOSE WHO DESERVE IT. Logical consistency is what matters most.

In fact, I have worked out an elegant formalized Mathematical Metatheory of Justice (my MMToJ) to be used to replace law as we know it.

And don’t worry: either Dr Jill Stein or Zoltan Istvan or Clifton Roberts or John McAfee will be elected president.
I’ve worn the Zoltan Istvan buttons all summer, so I should keep my loyalty to him and will probably vote for him.

Idiots call ANY philosophy or opinion they don’t like “religion”.
I have heard theist after theist call “atheism” a religion or “communism” a religion. (Yes, communism has been taken to extremes of forcing people to believe certain specific ridiculous things. Still does not mean communism has to be turned into a religion.)

Then they DAMNED well had better call ALL LAW, especially Western law, the world’s most dangerous violent religious cult, where they brainwash students into law school into believing such MYTHS that “bomb & death threats are illegal or a crime” or that “one HAS to show up to court if some judge says so”. Prove me wrong. Prove me judges & cops & prosecutors & prison guards will back down & not use violent force if they don’t get their way. And this goes, too, for the religious cult of the military.
And I am not even anti-war or anti-violence.
I care only about computing FAIRNESS & positives outweighing negatives for those who deserve it.

Show me political candidates for U.S. President who analyze everything I said here. Until then, NOBODY is “qualified” for president, because the concept is meaningless.

I think the near-converse of the proposition is much likelier to be true, namely, that everyone knows the Establishment is a rotten old building, and Trump is the only wrecking ball in town. (Bernie was another, but the DNC saw to it that he didn’t make it this far.) Indeed, I view this post’s quasi-mathematical presentation of Trump’s “obvious” unsuitability, and its utterly unsubstantiated assertions to that effect, to be classic tells of cognitive dissonance on this exact point.

With the entire mainstream united against him—including academia, the media, and both the Inner & Outer Parties—few want to admit publicly that Trump is the first candidate in years to offer a genuine alternative to Orwell as usual. Contra Terry’s hypothesis regarding an incipient transition from mutual to common knowledge, I propose we’re instead on the cusp of a preference cascade, leading to a general acknowledgment that a significant majority of voters back Trump for reasons that are rationally grounded in their own self-interest.

I’ll be surprised if I can persuade many with this short comment, but if you’re interested in digging deeper the blog of Scott Adams is simply essential. Start with Clown Genius, published August 2015, and read chronologically from there. If you consider Adams’s arguments (and track record of predictions) with an open mind, you’ll have to agree that Proposition 1, while perhaps true, is not obviously true.

I kept this URL around for the entire year.http://2016.presidential-candidates.org/
I have not counted how many names are on it now,
but at the start of 2016, I counted 84 candidates running for office.
With this new invention called the internet, humans can grow a brain
and look up each name and then go to their websites and check out each candidates’ past voting records on bills, how they would have voted, what they fought for, what struggles they are up against.

There exists absolutely nothing special, nothing unique about Trump. There is no logical reason to vote for him. Only some kind of bizarre mental sickness & insanity would think that a freeloading tax-avoiding Wall Street financial terrorist billionaire like Trump, who tortures & murders cows needlessly instead of mandating veganism, who gets billions of free handouts from the government, benefiting from socialism for the rich, but demanding & forcing capitalism on the poor, would give a damn about anyone but himself. Trump would destroy the USA even faster than Clinton, with his denial of AGW, and advocating murdering American citizen & patriot Edward Snowden. So I exercise my free speech right to advocate hanging/executing Trump for treason for doing nothing to end AGW,
not to mention doing nothing to end extreme political correctness.

The more I see subhumans vote for Trump & Clinton,
the more I realize anything is justified by the Principle of Explosion in Logic.
The more I realize they don’t have feelings.
There exists no scientific & no mathematical proof that Republican or Democrat voters have feelings.
There exists no scientific & no mathematical proof that anyone has ever broken any law ever in the history of the universe. That is just a fearmongering myth that police, judges, prison guards bureaucrats force onto citizens to extort & take their taxes & get rich.
There are no such things as “terrorist attacks”.
Those events are just atoms moving around.
All that matters is computing cause & effect logically consistently
upon each player, and choosing to cause more positive than negative for each player who deserves it. Obviously, no unique solutions exist,
but many alternatives can be eliminated.

Mathematicians, and the world, should be up in arms, doing any physical action to free patriotic American citizen & hero & mathematician, Dr Theodore Kaczynski, from prison. As is well known fact: all prisoners are prisoners of war: i.e. soldiers. There is no scientific & no mathematical proof that Dr Kaczynski, or anyone ever, has ever done anything “illegal”. That is just a myth that the religious cult of human law – lawyers, cops, prison guards, prosecutors, judge – use as an excuse to get rich.
PhD mathematicians should run the world, applying and forcing our PhD-level math into the computation of justice & fairness.

According to the ultra-politically correct conservative world: consequences of actions do not matter. Only respect & maintaining the status quo. Holding anyone hostage in prison is the most disrespectful thing you can do to another person.

The Principle of Explosion in Logic: this has to be applied ruthlessly against republicrat & demopublican voters.